As the 250th anniversary of the U.S.’s founding approaches, Florida Republicans are using public universities to help build conservative civics and public policy centers that reimagine U.S. history. Across the state, these taxpayer-funded centers are expanding their reach, drawing public money, influencing degree programs and extending into K-12 classrooms under the banner of civics renewals.
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Journalist Steven Thrasher’s second book, The Overseer Class, begins with a quote by James Baldwin from a 1967 essay in The New York Times, where Baldwin writes, “we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder — on your head.” To see the continuing relevance of that quote, look to the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols in 2023 — a Black man…
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The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map creating two Black-majority districts continues to remind us of how much the U.S. has backpedaled away from the so-called racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020. The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais undermines another key plank of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed more than 60 years ago with the intent of…
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Florida has released a new U.S. History course for high school students that aims to provide a conservative alternative to Advanced Placement courses — the latest attack on public education in the state by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Though students across the country take Advanced Placement courses for college credit — with over half a million U.S. high school students doing so last year…
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The State Department issued a cable in November instructing employees not to cite reports on human rights abuses from organizations or media outlets that don’t comply with President Donald Trump’s orders on racial justice or restrictions on trans rights, new reporting finds. “Do not use any information from a non-government source (e.g., an NGO, even if it is or has been funded by the U.S.
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student Juliana Lewis took a course on public discourse in 2024 that was housed within the university’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). Though the course focused more on political theory and the foundations of democracy than she expected, she enjoyed it. But when another student told her that SCiLL was “a school for conservative belief…
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