Episodes of three popular Adult Swim series—Aqua Teen Hunger Force, The Boondocks, and The Shivering Truth—have been removed from streaming due to current “sensitivities,” The Daily Beast has learned exclusively. Eagle-eyed Redditors first noted the absence of Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s Season 6 episode “Shake Like Me” from the series’ page on HBO Max in June. In the 2009 episode, titled in homage to John Howard […]
Racism in the United States
102 posts
While one could fairly question how much influencers have given to us—as a species and a society—it’s undeniable that they’re real innovators when it comes to finding ways to be weird about race. Whether it’s blackfishing or posting black squares on Instagram as though that somehow supports Black Lives Matter, influencers just have a knack for being thoroughly embarrassing. And now they have a new medium: […]
When a Louisville grand jury chose not to charge any of the police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor for their role in killing a 26-year-old Black woman, it was confirmation that, to many, my life as a Black woman does not matter. And as a native Kentuckian, that shattered me. I spent my early years and every summer in Southeastern Kentucky. As I […]
When the cuffs came out and my head was slammed onto the hood of my rented car, I knew this was more than a traffic ticket. True, I was doing 40 in a 30 zone or something like that. I’m not sure. The signs changed so quickly and so often, some obscured by trees, it was hard to tell. The first thing I learned was that […]
In October of 2006, the FBI released an intelligence assessment titled, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Though the document—culled from FBI investigations and open sources—was heavily redacted, it reached a number of disturbing conclusions. The assessment revealed that white supremacists “have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities”; that many of these white-supremacist infiltrators are known as “ghost skins” […]
Appearances are everything down South, part of the region’s noted cordiality and social decorum. Yet on coastal Alabama’s Mobile Bay, a group of residents is determined to peel back their languid locale’s veneer of colonnaded mansions and Spanish moss-draped oaks to confront the proverbial “ugliness that cuts to the bone.” And to build something better from those truths. A cross-section of faces spanning age, sex and […]
Trump’s four-year mantra to Black voters, people like me, has been “what do you have to lose?” He has proclaimed it loudly since the summer of 2016 to all who will listen. Trump has stepped up that refrain in recent months, saying, “I have done more for Black Americans than any President, maybe with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.” What about old Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin […]
When the coronavirus began ravaging New York City, Chenghui Zhang’s parents begged her to return to China. But Zhang, who is 25 and also goes by the adopted first name Helen, would not leave her adopted home of nearly seven years. “It was very scary, but I told them that it was better for me to not move for now,” Zhang told The Daily Beast on […]
It is, allegedly, the last time we will see Richard Nelson’s Apple family during the pandemic. How are the liberal, white, arty, upstate-dwelling American upper-middle classes feeling as lockdown eases and the election approaches? The last of a trio of plays, Incidental Moments of the Day suggests the answer is, as confined and confused as the rest of us. Here again, discussing, needling, laughing, and consoling […]
As we come to the 19th anniversary of 9/11, the New York City Fire Department has renamed its highest award for bravery from that of an avowedly racist newspaper publisher who supported slavery to that of the chief who died while directing operations at the World Trade Center. After he nearly perished in the collapse of the South Tower, Chief Peter Ganci remained in harm’s way […]
Give the players credit. The first two teams to take the field for the 2020 NFL season—the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans— knew a lot of eyes would be on them Thursday night. After a summer of athlete protests, including postponed NBA, MLB and NHL games, they could have refused to play. They could have all taken a knee during the national anthem. But instead […]
In the fall of 2018, I returned to my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to help fix a broken health department. Among other scandals, the agency had failed to follow through on monitoring for possible lead poisoning among local children. As the only Black woman health officer in the state, the luster of being in the role wore off rather quickly. Mostly, I found myself praying that […]
As she was putting together her portfolio collection during her last year as a fashion student at Parsons School of Design, Najla A. Burt called her mother for help. She needed to come up with a name for her clothing line. “We had a conversation around why she should not make her label her name,” Cynthia Burt, Najla’s mother, recalled in an interview with The Daily […]
A few weeks ago, I re-watched Jordan Peele’s racial thriller Get Out. The movie still elicits a visceral response of horror, mostly due to its banality and familiarity. The upper-class liberal white family is creepy, but they are given the benefit of the doubt, repeatedly. The situation is familiar to many of us who move in racially mixed social and work spaces. We ignore the uneasiness […]
Theatre for One: Here We Are boils drama down to essentials: one viewer, one actor, and a visceral live-wire connection that manages to transcend physical space. Presented by Arts Brookfield and billed as a digital theatrical experience, the eight micro-plays burn fast and bright, pairing one performer with one audience member for a live two-way video call. Written, performed, and directed by Black, indigenous, and other […]
Two House Democrats are urging the nation’s top intelligence official to make public what they argue is crucial information about the extent to which foreign actors are exploiting recent racial and social unrest in the U.S. to advance their own agendas. In a September 1 letter obtained by The Daily Beast, Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Val Demings (D-FL), members of the House Intelligence Committee, thank […]
Here we go. It’s law and order week. And with the eyes of the nation fixed on Kenosha, Joe Biden is going to… southwestern Pennsylvania, to give a speech on why you aren’t safe in Donald Trump’s America. And Trump is going to Kenosha on Tuesday. So we confront one of the enduring questions of American presidential politics, which goes back to Richard Nixon’s time: Can […]
As a Black queer millennial, I’m often told I’m strong. For my mere existence alone is often said to be an act of resilience. I live in a world where people who look like me are being extrajudicially killed by cops on viral videos. A global pandemic is taking away my skinfolk more rapidly than any other population. And bigotry, H.I.V., gun violence, opioids, and poverty […]
I attended my very first Sundance Film Festival in January of 1997. I loved the energy and the community that came together around a shared passion for independent film and the discovery of new filmmakers. But when the lights came on, I saw very few people in the audience who looked like me. It was mostly white men. Were there Black filmmakers who didn’t know about […]
What can definitively be said about the Republican National Convention’s weaponizing of Blackness and poverty to spout predictable American mythology? Trump and his cronies say again and again that he has “done the most for black people.” In fact, every U.S. government has failed and brutalized Black Americans and countless racialized people in the country and outside of it. The most significant positive change to Black […]
I dare you to examine the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins and tell me America has changed. Yusuf Hawkins was a 16-year-old Black teenager who, along with three friends, went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, one summer night to look at a used car his buddy Troy had found for sale in the newspaper. Yusuf didn’t know anyone in Bensonhurst, but he and his friends found themselves surrounded […]
Stephen Colbert opened his show Wednesday night with a confession. “Now, full disclosure: I did not watch much of the convention tonight. And fullest disclosure: I did not watch any of it,” the Late Show host said. “Because right now in America, we’re facing a global pandemic that has killed 180,000 Americans, heavily armed Rambo wannabes are murdering people in our streets, the strongest hurricane in […]
Before the NBA kicked off its rebooted season in Disney World, promises were made. The league and Commissioner Adam Silver swore that despite being ensconced in a semipermeable bubble in Orlando, Florida, players would in no way be hindered from participating in the nationwide uprising against police brutality and state-sanctioned violence largely inflicted upon people of color. In fact, their voices would not only be heard, […]
After the NBA suspended all playoff games on Wednesday night following a protest walkout by the Milwaukee Bucks over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, Charles Barkley shared his uncensored reaction on CNN. The former basketball star and current co-host of TNT’s Inside the NBA said the Bucks “deserve a lot of credit” for their “courageous” act of refusing to play, but his biggest question is […]
More than once in our conversation, the Broadway producer Brian Moreland qualifies an optimistic thought with, “I know that sounds very Pollyanna of me.” Moreland, one of the few Black producers working on Broadway, is hopeful for not just the healthy, post-pandemic return of Broadway, but also for a renewed kind of commercial theater which looks, sounds, and feels more diverse. “I feel there’s change in the […]
What is it about courtside at the Oakland Arena that really brings out the worst our country has to offer? You may recall, during the 2019 NBA Finals, when Golden State Warriors’ part-owner and venture-capitalist scumbag Mark Stevens took a second out of his night to shove Raptors guard Kyle Lowry and then call him a “piece of shit,” all for the crime of trying hard […]
On September 11, 2017, Jemele Hill tweeted, “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounding himself w/ other white supremacists.” And, even though the 99-character pronouncement came a few weeks after Trump referred to a group of white nationalist protesters as “very fine people,” pearls were firmly clutched. A vocal faction of conservatives, including the president and his then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called […]
Citing health concerns, the president of the National Organization for Women stepped down Sunday, amid a flurry of allegations of racism at the nation’s oldest and largest feminist organization. In an email to the NOW board, state presidents, and staff on Sunday night, President Toni Van Pelt announced she would be stepping down with two weeks’ notice effective Aug. 28. Vice President Christian Nunes will take […]
The only thing more dangerous than monsters in Lovecraft Country are racists—although there are plenty of both in HBO’s new series, and sometimes they’re one and the same. Blending comedy and drama, horror and sci-fi, social commentary and genre thrills, showrunner/writer Misha Green’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel tackles American intolerance through the prism of author H.P. Lovecraft, whose famed work about ancient, incomprehensible evils […]
Since he was in elementary school summiting flagpoles, eating his lunch at the top of basketball hoops, and wriggling his way up the exposed seams of brick buildings, Kai Lightner has been a fearless climber. The 20-year-old professional from Fayetteville, North Carolina, has tackled some of the hardest routes in the world, ascending the formidable Era Vella in Margalef, Spain, when he was just 15. Still […]
It’s clear enough that Ben Shapiro and Republican candidate James P. Bradley’s puritanical pearl clutching over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s (censored!) music video “WAP,” which stands for Wet-Ass Pussy, is largely irrelevant. Shapiro’s and Bradley’s statements decrying the explicit message of the song and the (un)dress in the video constitute the kind of performative moral panics that are so baldly opportunistic as to render […]
Warning: This post contains content that may be disturbing to viewers. Newly released video shows a North Carolina man’s final moments in a county jail, where he called out, “I can’t breathe,” as detention officers held him face down for 12 minutes and made jokes while trying to remove his handcuffs. The footage was made public on Wednesday after a group of news outlets, including The […]
Fox News star Tucker Carlson—currently facing outrage from network colleagues over his racist rhetoric—upped the ante on Monday night, claiming it was “probably illegal” for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to prioritize Black women in his running mate search while calling those candidates unqualified. Carlson, whose former head writer was recently outed as an outspoken racist, kicked off Monday night’s broadcast of his hit primetime […]