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      Tulsa Creates Commission on Reparations for Race Massacre

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      The NewsThe mayor of Tulsa, Okla., announced on Thursday the creation of a commission tasked with developing a plan for reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst racial attacks in U.S. history. The commission will study how reparations can be made to survivors of the massacre and their descendants, as well as residents of North Tulsa.Community members, activists, city leaders, clergy and children prayed in 2019 beside two grave markers for victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesWhy It MattersDuring the 1921 massacre, white mobs burned Greenwood, a prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall Street, to the ground. As many as 300 Black people were killed, hundreds more were injured, and thousands were left homeless. City officials, historians and the courts acknowledge that the massacre has led to generations of racial inequity in Tulsa.Calls for reparations in Tulsa are longstanding and have resulted in apologies, a scholarship program and other actions, but not direct financial redress.The last two known survivors of the massacre, now centenarians, have pursued reparations through the courts, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their case in June.Two reports — one from a commission created by the State Legislature in 2001 and one by a group of Tulsa residents in 2023 — recommended reparations, including financial compensation. The commission announced Thursday, named the Beyond Apology Commission, follows the 2023 report’s calls for the city to create a group to examine and carry out a reparations program.Mayor G.T. Bynum, a Republican, has signaled that he wants this body to make recommendations that would result in tangible action. He wrote a social media post this week that the commission is not intended to be merely a “study group.”He also noted that part of the group’s mission is to produce a plan for a housing equity program by the end of November. (The mayor, who created the commission by executive order, is not seeking re-election, and his term will end in December.)Funds that could be used for that program have already been approved by voters, the mayor said.The debate over reparations has at times divided the city. In 2021, a dispute over who should compensate the survivors and their descendants preceded the sudden cancellation of an event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the massacre.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Appeals Court Further Narrows Voting Rights Act’s Scope

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      Reversing decades of precedent, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in a Texas case that different minority groups cannot jointly claim that their votes have been diluted.A federal appeals court further narrowed the scope of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ruling that members of separate minority groups cannot join together to claim that a political map has been drawn to dilute their voting power.The 12-to-6 ruling on Thursday by the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned almost four decades of legal precedent, as well as an earlier ruling by a three-judge panel of the same appeals court. It applies only in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the three states where the court has jurisdiction, but the decision has national implications and may be appealed to the Supreme Court.The case involved districts for county commissioners in Galveston County, Texas, a community of about 350,000 people, where the last round of redistricting redrew a district in which Black and Hispanic voters together made up a majority of voters. The redrawn boundaries reduced their combined share of the district’s electorate to 38 percent, and a lawsuit claimed that doing so violated Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing maps that dilute minority voting power.A lower court and the three-judge appellate panel both ruled that the new map was a clear violation of the law. But the full Fifth Circuit disagreed, saying that the law does not explicitly allow voters from more than one minority group to “combine forces” to claim their votes were diluted.The 12 judges in the majority were all appointed by Republican presidents. Five of the six dissenters were named by Democratic presidents. More

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      Los ataques contra Kamala Harris reflejan el auge de la vulgaridad y la intolerancia en internet

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      Los políticos suelen sufrir ataques racistas y sexistas en internet. Pero Harris está siendo atacada en más plataformas, con nuevas tecnologías y ante audiencias más numerosas que Barack Obama y Hillary Clinton.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En internet ya se hacían ataques racistas y sexistas mucho antes de que la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris iniciara su campaña presidencial este mes, incluso durante la campaña de Barack Obama y Hillary Clinton. Sin embargo, desde las últimas elecciones presidenciales, se ha vuelto aún más virulento y más central para la política estadounidense.En 2008, Obama se enfrentó a un ecosistema en el que Facebook tenía millones de usuarios, no miles de millones, y el iPhone apenas tenía un año de haber salido al mercado. En 2016, la campaña de Clinton vigilaba un puñado de plataformas de redes sociales, no decenas. En 2020, cuando Harris era la compañera de fórmula de Joe Biden, era mucho más difícil utilizar la inteligencia artificial para producir las representaciones pornográficas falsas y los videos engañosos en los que ahora se dice que aparece.En solo una semana desde que Harris —negra, de ascendencia india y mujer— se convirtió en la presunta candidata presidencial demócrata, han aparecido falsas narrativas y teorías conspirativas sobre ella por todo el panorama digital.Muchas cosas han cambiado de cara a las elecciones de 2024. Ahora, a esas afirmaciones se han incrementado, alimentadas por un tono cada vez más agresivo del discurso político respaldado por políticos de alto nivel, impulsado por la IA y otras nuevas tecnologías, y difundido a través de un paisaje en línea mucho más fragmentado y repleto de plataformas sin moderación.“La esfera política ha sido sexista y racista durante mucho tiempo. Lo que ha cambiado es el ecosistema de medios en el que crece esa retórica problemática”, afirmó Meg Heckman, profesora adjunta de Periodismo de la Universidad Northeastern. “Es casi como si hubiera varios universos mediáticos paralelos, de modo que no todos operamos con un conjunto de hechos compartidos”, agregó.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History

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      White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.The audience of Black journalists was prepared for a combative exchange well before Donald J. Trump took the stage on Wednesday for an interview at their annual gathering in Chicago.Yet when Mr. Trump, just minutes in, began questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, there was an instant ripple of reaction — a low rumble that grew into a roar of disapproval.“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language, it was hardly surprising. The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended.The audacity of Mr. Trump — a white man — questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Responds to Trump’s Comments About Her Identity: ‘Divisiveness and Disrespect’

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      Vice President Kamala Harris carefully hit back at former President Donald J. Trump after he questioned the legitimacy of her identity as a Black woman, saying on Wednesday that he had put on the “same old show” of “divisiveness and disrespect.”“The American people deserve better,” Ms. Harris said at a convention of Sigma Gamma Rho, one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities. “The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”But she did not directly quote or refer to Mr. Trump’s comments earlier on Wednesday in Chicago, where he had asked of Ms. Harris: “Is she Indian or is she Black?” He had also falsely claimed that Ms. Harris used to identify as Indian and then “all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”The vice president is of Jamaican and Indian heritage, and attended Howard University, a historically Black university.Ms. Harris’s precisely calibrated rebuttal was perhaps an early indication of how she will respond to crude and racist attacks from Mr. Trump. Former President Barack Obama largely ignored Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, who falsely accused him of being born in Kenya.Her remarks on Wednesday came after she has sought to place her campaign on the continuum of racial progress in America, referring to it in the same breath as abolitionists and civil rights activists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump to Address NABJ Conference Following Controversial Invitation

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      Former President Donald J. Trump will take questions on Wednesday in Chicago from members of the National Association of Black Journalists, appearing before a skeptical conference of reporters in the city that will host the Democratic National Convention in less than three weeks.The appearance of the Republican presidential nominee at 1 p.m. Eastern time has already divided the association, prompting a co-chairwoman of the convention, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, to step down from her post and eliciting a warning from a prominent member, April Ryan, that Mr. Trump’s White House was threatening to Black women.“The reports of attacks on Black women White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or conjecture, but fact,” Ms. Ryan, the White House correspondent for The Grio, a media company geared toward Black Americans, wrote on the social platform X.But leaders of the association said journalists should not shy from interviewing major party candidates for the presidency. The association also invited Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, but the group’s president, Ken Lemon, said Wednesday morning that she was not available.“We are in talks about virtual options in the future and are still working to reach an agreement,” he wrote.For Mr. Trump, there appears to be no downside: A hostile greeting would feed his efforts to play supporters off the media. A warmer welcome would help his outreach to Black voters.The conference’s description says the session will “concentrate on the most pressing issues facing the Black community.” Harris Faulkner, a Fox News anchor; Kadia Goba, a politics reporter at Semafor; and Rachel Scott, an ABC News correspondent, will moderate the session. The event is expected to be livestreamed on the organization’s YouTube and Facebook pages. More

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      Test Your Literary Knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance

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      Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s installment tests your knowledge of novels, poems and memoirs by writers connected to the Harlem Renaissance, a creative movement by Black authors, artists and musicians that crystallized into a cultural force a century ago. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books and other information if you’d like to do some further reading.3 of 5In 1930, Langston Hughes collaborated on a play called “Mule Bone,” which was never finished but was published in a new edition and produced on Broadway in 1991, long after both authors were dead. His co-writer, who was also an anthropologist, was the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, including an autobiography titled “Dust Tracks on a Road.” Who was it? More