Every day of the transition has brought fresh reminders that racism is thriving in America. Recall these six WaPo stories from just the past week:
- Dash cam video shows police tackling and beating a black Northwestern doctoral student who they suspected of stealing a car. The problem: It was his vehicle.
- A federal investigation into the Chicago police found that the department routinely uses excessive force and violates the constitutional rights of residents, particularly those who are black and Latino. (Read the scathing 164-page report by the Justice Department.)
- A school board member in small-town Arkansas, who wore a blackface costume, refused to resign. Instead, he received an award for being “outstanding.” People from the community wore T-shirts that said “I stand with Ted.”
- “A Dairy Queen owner unleashed a racist tirade against a customer” (and her young children).
- Police in Rockville, Maryland, are investigating after a note containing Nazi imagery was left on a car belonging to a Jewish couple who had recently displayed a “Black Lives Matter” banner.
- A white supremacist petition that circulated at Anne Arundel High School in Maryland described African Americans as a “scourge,” said they “invented” rape, stealing and basketball, and spoke of “the supreme White race.” The petition was labeled Kool Kids Klan — its three K’s underlined in a thinly veiled reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
-- Other stories you might recall since the election: Carl Paladino, the former Republican nominee for governor of New York, included the death of President Obama and the “return” of first lady Michelle Obama to Africa on his list of things he wanted for 2017. He wrote that he would like to see FLOTUS “return to being male” and be “let loose” in Zimbabwe. The director of a government-funded nonprofit in West Virginia celebrated the idea of Melania Trump replacing Mrs. Obama, as well. “It will be so refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady back in the White House,” she wrote on Facebook. “I’m tired of seeing a (sic) Ape in heels.”
-- The Fourth Circuit lamented last summer how North Carolina’s legislature “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Lawmakers literally requested data on racial differences in voter behavior and then made the only acceptable forms of voter identification the ones that they knew were disproportionately used by white people.
