Louisiana lawmakers are still fighting hard to keep the state’s second majority-Black House district from ever seeing the light of day. Last week, three federal judges rejected a map drawn that contained a second majority-Black district. Gov. Jeff Landry and state Attorney General Liz Murrill both supported the map. The rejected map was drawn in January after a judge blocked a map from 2022 that only had one Black-majority district and five mostly white districts, in a state with a population that’s about one-third Black, according to AP. A group...

Hertsgaard is the author of seven previous books that have been translated into a total of seventeen languages. He is the environment correspondent for The Nation and the executive director of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now Deborah “Big Red” Cotton and I met by getting shot together. It was a Mother’s Day afternoon during Barack Obama’s second term as America’s first Black president. We were two of 19 people gunned down in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans, a city stained by racism...

Comedian Katt Williams took on the subject of reparations during his new Netflix stand-up special Woke Foke, saying the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. has sent to Ukraine should go instead to black Americans. Katt Williams’ special streamed live on Saturday from the YouTube Theater in Inglewood, California. The comedian joked about a wide range of subjects, including the bag of cocaine found at the White House and transgender athletes (“penginas” or “clitoris dickoris dock”?). But his bit about reparations has generated the most attention. “It is now...

O.J. Simpson died on Thursday at the age of 76, and the media didn’t quite know what to do. They didn’t know what to do because O.J. Simpson was a murderer, and everyone knows he was a murderer. But he spent the last half of his life being treated by some in the media as though he was a sort of controversial figure. A headline from the Washington Post summed this up: “How will O.J. Simpson be remembered?” The answer for everyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson murder trial is...

WASHINGTON — The scenes of Donald Trump being warmly greeted on Wednesday by a Black audience at a Chick-fil-A restaurant in Atlanta electrified conservative political media at a moment when Republicans hope to make inroads with Democrats’ most committed voting bloc. Those widely shared moments were days in the making, an alliance between the Trump campaign, local activists, and students at some of the nation’s most iconic historically Black colleges. Trump and his allies have argued he can win greater Black support due to his messages on the economy and...