When the Biden Food and Drug Administration announced its plan to ban menthols, it cited the fact that “out of all Black smokers, nearly 85 percent smoke menthol cigarettes, compared to 30 percent of White smokers who smoke menthols.” Other kinds of flavored cigarettes—which apparently once included cinnamon, toffee, vanilla and bourbon, among so many other disgusting tobacco flavor profiles—were banned back in 2009, but not […]
Kali Holloway
21 posts
A mere three years ago, Brett Kavanaugh had a full-on meltdown while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations that he committed sexual assault in high school at the age of 17. Red-faced and sneering, overflowing with both indignation and entitled frat-boy rage, Kavanaugh denounced the proceedings, denying the charges—but also suggesting the sentient keg-stand he’d been in high school didn’t define who he’d grown […]
We learned a lot about what happens behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace from Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, but maybe the most astonishing revelation was that Meghan Markle felt like she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore” during her former life as a royal. The over the top racism and sexism she experienced, both within the Royal Family […]
Studying the extent of the damage caused by Black chattel slavery would be —and I mean this literally—the very least America could do to address racial inequality. But white conservatives oppose a bill that would undertake even that baby step. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last week that President Joe Biden would support an investigation of the enduring impact of slavery and the inequities […]
The Trump administration’s sole success was in removing any lingering doubt that the right-wing is a death cult. This president’s nihilistic indifference to the coronavirus pandemic helped kill 385,000, his incitement of his white supremacist followers left five dead after the Capitol insurgency, and his administration’s anti-immigrant family separation policy killed children. In its final act of bloodthirsty callousness, as a petty parting boast of its […]
Dustin Higgs, a Black federal inmate whom the Trump Justice Department plans to kill next month, tested positive for COVID-19 this Thursday. One day later, Corey Johnson, another Black man the government also plans to murder on its way out the door, was also diagnosed with the disease. Per the Bureau of Prisons, the two are among at least 309 inmates and nearly 30 staff with […]
Let’s just call what happened in Washington, D.C. today what it was: An anti-democracy protest by an assortment of white supremacists, violent fascists, and conspiracy nuts. They came to town to collectively demand the disenfranchisement of more than 78 million Americans, Joe Biden voters, and to reaffirm that “legal votes” can only be cast by white folks outside of miscegenated cities. Had they been marching against […]
For about 24 hours after the 2020 election was called for Joe Biden, Democrats and other opponents of fascism—which is to say, anti-fascists—danced in the streets in an outpouring of both joy and relief at the end of the most openly bigoted, corrupt and destructive presidential administration in the modern era. And then, like clockwork, the same awful people who have supported this awful president re-proved […]
I feel fairly confident in this moment stating that I know white people better than they know themselves. That’s the only conclusion I can logically come to now that all those predictions of white Trump voters abandoning Donald Trump have turned out to be as wrong as I predicted. After four years of lily-white newsrooms cranking out “Trump Supporters Steadfastly Supporting Trump” articles, the media ignored […]
I’m exhausted, and I’m speaking for all of us. This presidency has seemingly lasted forever, and the primary season felt like an endurance test. But more specifically, I’m tired of Donald Trump’s incessant lying, his transparent racism, his oozing of toxicity. There was plenty of all of that on display during the final presidential debate, which again saw Trump square off against Joe Biden, this time […]
Look, I’m voting for Joe Biden. I get why white racists and millionaires—and people who stand at the intersection of those two groups—are all-in for Donald Trump, but for the rest of us, self-preservation dictates that Biden is the better choice. Thursday night’s dueling presidential town halls, which featured a belligerent Trump and a comparatively contemplative Biden, drove that all the way home. If I believed, […]
Candace Owens’ BLEXIT Foundation—founded to give people the false impression that Black voters are abandoning the Democratic party en masse for Republicanism—reportedly put together Saturday’s campaign event thinly disguised as an official government function, where Donald Trump spoke to a pro-police Black and Latinx audience from the Truman Balcony during what was in effect his first in-person rally since his trip to Walter Reed. Two thousand […]
I got a tension headache from watching the vice presidential debate. I recognized the source instantly, because it felt exactly like the throbbing pain I’ve felt every time I’ve had a man shout me down, cut me off and interrupt me during what’s supposed to be a public conversation. And I honestly cannot imagine that millions of women didn’t also instantly recognize the same feeling after […]
Every element of the criminal system is implicated in the failure to secure justice for Breonna Taylor. The cops, per the judge who signed off the warrant that set the events leading to Taylor’s murder in motion, likely obtained that paperwork using fabricated information. Shoddy police work saw Louisville law enforcement raid Taylor’s home despite the fact that the suspect they sought was already in their […]
On the second night of its national convention, the Party of Trump resorted to reruns, hammering home the message he’s been pushing for four years: That the radical left—with help from Communist China and the Lamestream Media—is hellbent on destroying the traditional (white) American way of life, and the only person who can stop them is Trump. Among the invitees to take up the theme was […]
Concluding the opening night of a Democratic Convention that until a few minutes earlier had felt overly platitudinous, centrist and bloodless, Michelle Obama delivered a speech that was the opposite—impassioned, uplifting and, at the same time, full of truths about America that this country rarely likes to acknowledge about itself. One of the most astounding moments in a speech filled with them came when the former […]
In a primary debate Sunday night, 39-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy III was asked again about his decision to join a famously racist, Robert E. Lee revering fraternity in the early 2000s and why he’d only recently made the decision to disaffiliate himself from it. Kennedy punted again, saying that “I wish I hadn’t joined” but that his Stanford chapter of Kappa Alpha “had almost no relation […]
Cops lie, not just often, but with the bravado and confidence of people who know they will neither be caught nor held accountable. And plenty of those lies are made against people working for crap wages and no benefits in the service industry. In recent weeks, New York City officers fabricated poisoned Shake Shack milkshakes, a Georgia cop paranoia-conjured a tainted McMuffin, and a Los Angeles […]
Five years ago today, a white neo-Confederate shot dead nine black parishioners at Mother Emanuel Baptist Church, located just up the street from where a statue honoring John C. Calhoun—who in an 1837 speech famously deemed the enslavement of black human beings “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good”—has stood for more than 130 years in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina. On Wednesday afternoon, […]
A Birmingham crowd protesting white supremacist terror toppled a statue honoring Charles Linn, who fought with the Confederate Navy to keep black folks enslaved in perpetuity. On the campus of the University of Mississippi—where the sports mascot until 2003 was a Confederate soldier character called “Colonel Reb” and “Dixie” was the fight song for another 13 years—a protester defaced a Confederate statue. Along Richmond’s Monument Avenue—a […]
Minnesota law enforcement’s latest spate of terror started with the murder of George Floyd and has continued unabated with cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas—in the midst of a respiratory pandemic—at peaceful protesters. They’re far from alone. Officers have launched attacks against demonstrators in cities all over the country, Omaha, San Francisco, Portland, Columbus, Dallas, New York and Denver among them. People in Michigan protesting […]