The darling of the far right recently appeared on The Breakfast Club and Joe Budden’s podcast – exploiting Black America’s willingness to forgive

As a provocateur, Candace Owens stands alone. The recently fired Daily Wire host built a reputation as one of the few Black voices in rightwing media by tossing Black culture and Black people under the conservative bus. She embraced Donald Trump’s lawlessness while castigating Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Black victims of police brutality as “thugs” and criminals . For Owens, the January 6 insurrection was “ virtually nothing ”, while the Black Lives Matter movement “ is about Black anarchy ”. She told a congressional subcommittee that “white supremacy and white nationalism is not a problem that is harming Black America”.

According to her, everything wrong with Black America is caused by Black culture and white liberals, but affirmative action is an affront to whites. Like her former bosses at the rightwing youth organization Turning Point USA, Owens doesn’t believe in systemic racism because she’s “ never been a slave in this country ”. When it comes to anti-Blackness, she is as remarkably consistent as the angry throngs that spat on third-graders desegregating schools while painting the civil rights movement as “ violent ”.

Former White House adviser and white nationalist Stephen Miller plans to reinterpret civil rights laws should Trump return to power

The former Trump White House adviser, anti-immigration extremist and white nationalist Stephen Miller is helping drive a plan to tackle supposed “anti-white racism” if Donald Trump returns to power next year, Axios reported .

“Longtime aides and allies … have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints – some of which have been successful,” Axios said on Monday.

American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

Leftwing parties call for government action after footage of incident in Lavapiés spread on social media

Leftwing parties in Spain are demanding explanations after a video appeared to show a pair of police officers using violent force on two unarmed black men in a central Madrid neighbourhood.

The video, shot on Friday in Lavapiés, appears to show one of the men on the ground and immobilised by a police officer who seemingly has him in a chokehold. A second police officer appears to then strike the immobilised man twice with a baton before grabbing and punching another man standing nearby.

A Central Park birdwatching incident went viral after Christian Cooper filmed a white woman threatening him. Now he is using his platform to share his passion for nature

In May 2020, Christian Cooper was in an area called the Ramble in Central Park in New York. It’s a beautiful place, he says, and vital to the local bird population. So when he saw a dog off its leash, which is not permitted in the Ramble to protect the birds, he confronted the owner.

The woman, angry that Cooper was filming, said she would call the police and say ‘an African American’ man was threatening her if he did not stop. The video went viral and the ugly incident sparked fury, coming as it did on the same day as the death of George Floyd.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Paul Grellong’s gripping dialogue makes a brisk plot and unlikable characters immensely watchable as a Harvard professor invites a white supremacist for a debate

‘I’m one of the good guys,” insists a beleaguered Harvard professor facing student protests after inviting a white supremacist to be part of a university debate on extremism. The defence, for Charles Nichols (Julian Ovenden), is that illogical or offensive arguments need to be heard in order to be dismantled, though hand-wringing principal Amy Katz (Tanya Franks) suggests he is doing this as an attention-grabbing career move.

Paul Grellong’s intelligent if schematic play incorporates themes of cancel culture, Nazi legacies and the intersection between freedom of expression and hate speech.

Americans of Middle Eastern descent used to have to identify as white on government forms – new categories will change that

For the first time in 27 years, the US government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.

The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This evolving process often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as a wish for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.

Draft law, which also affects redheads, blond people, and those with dreadlocks now goes to upper Senate

France’s lower house of parliament has approved a bill forbidding workplace discrimination based on hair texture , which the draft law’s backers say targets mostly black women wearing their hair naturally.

Olivier Serva, an independent National Assembly deputy for the French overseas territory of Guadeloupe and the bill’s sponsor, said it would penalise any workplace discrimination based on “hairstyle, colour, length or texture”.

Too often cemeteries for enslaved people have been all but erased from history but how we remember matters

• Buried: remembering the transatlantic slave trade

For archeologists, what defines people as human is how we bury our dead. Imagine, then, a society that relegates a whole community as legally inhuman, enslaved with no rights. In spite of slavery, African burial grounds are tangible reminders of the enslaved and free – defying oppressive circumstances by reclaiming people’s humanity through acts of remembrance.

When I first visited the British overseas territory of St Helena in 2018 and saw the burial ground in Rupert’s Valley, I was astounded by its size and significance. It unambiguously placed the island at the centre of the Middle Passage – tying the British empire to the institution of slavery in the US, the Caribbean, and globally.