The Emancipator

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The Emancipator

A digital magazine dedicated to examining and confronting racism and the inequities it creates. Co-founded by Dr. Ibram X.

The Emancipator reimagines the nation’s first abolitionist newspapers — for a new day. Kendi and Bina Venkataraman, The Emancipator is a digital commentary platform dedicated to achieving racial justice in America and beyond. The platform features original perspectives from leading scholars, journalists, and community members, who engage in exploring solutions to racial inequality and its intersections.

07/07/2025

The recent U.S. bombing of Iran appears to be part and parcel of a larger colonial project under the Trump administration. With high-profile efforts to colonize Canada and Greenland effectively serving as distractions, the United States appears to be engaged in the recolonization of the Global South. It is using military interventions, tariffs, and travel bans to reassert U.S. power and neocolonial subjugation.⁠
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Read more of our analysis below and in the link in bio.

06/30/2025

President Donald Trump’s second term has created a state of fear. Many Americans fear this administration’s vengeance and retribution, its threatening, arresting, kidnapping, defunding, firing, criminalizing, bombing, and the possibility of World War III. “Fear is a weapon of control. Rulers can leverage fear to thwart resistance,” writes Ibram X. Kendi, a National Book Award-winning historian and author of the new biography, “Malcolm Lives!” “The power of fear can cause people to fear their power.”⁠
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That’s why the legacy of Malcolm X matters today, Kendi argues. As threats escalated over the last year of his life, Malcolm constantly expressed he had no fear. He didn’t allow fear to stop his resistance, inspiring resistors today.⁠
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Read more in the link in bio.

06/27/2025

In a potential blow to the fight to protect birthright citizenship, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday limited judges’ ability to delay President Donald Trump’s executive orders from going into effect.

The 6-3 decision, mere weeks after thousands took to the streets across the country for the “No Kings” protests, is the latest turn in the showdown over birthright citizenship for those born to immigrants who are undocumented. In a dissent from the more liberal-leaning minority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision would “cause chaos for the families of all affected children.”

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize fi****ms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship,” she wrote.

The high court’s decision did not delve into the merits of the Trump administration’s legally questionable quest to end birthright citizenship, which was established by the 14th Amendment in a reversal of the Dred Scott decision, a ruling that barred Black people from obtaining citizenship.

When Trump issued an executive order on day one of his second term barring citizenship for children born to parents with temporary or without legal immigration status, writer Jeff Yang immediately sounded the alarm in a sharp commentary that lays out both the importance of birthright citizenship and its vulnerabilities to a growing conservative movement to dismantle it.

What’s more, the rhetoric of reserving citizenship for only the deserving is an effective divide-and-conquer tactic that can divide communities of color at a time when coalition building is more important than ever.

Read more below and at the link in our bio.

06/26/2025

In her final newsletter and last day leading The Emancipator, publisher and general manager Amber Payne writes that she is “filled with gratitude and pride. These four years have been about building something bold and necessary — and now, I leave knowing the work will continue.”

After June 30, The Emancipator will transition from Boston University to Howard University as part of our co-founder Ibram X. Kendi’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will be dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of racism in the global African Diaspora. The Emancipator will be part of the institute’s larger mission to enhance the general public’s understanding of racism and evidence-based antiracist solutions through academic and publicly accessible research, public lectures, events, workshops, and outreach programs.

Read more about Payne’s transformative work building a modern abolitionist newsroom at the link in our bio.

06/25/2025

The wrongheaded and false notion that cultural differences have little to no impact on how people learn, work or play is one of the more specious ploys those who seek to dismantle DEI initiatives use to press their argument. This tactic was on display during a congressional subcommittee hearing on Wednesday when Cato Institute expert Erec Smith testified that DEI principles fuel the notion that color blindness is racist.

“If you tell people that color blindness is a bad thing, you’re telling them what to think of me without my say. If you tell somebody to look at a Black person and say, ‘Well, they’re Black, you need to look at them differently,’ you’re telling them to look at me differently without my say. You cannot erase individuality, individual sovereignty from this. Yes, we are parts of groups, but we are also, and perhaps primarily, individuals,” Smith told lawmakers during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing dubbed “Sacrificing Excellence for Ideology: The Real Cost of DEI.”

However, research has shown that by nearly every metric, culturally competent approaches to how we teach our kids, interact in the workplace, receive health care, and more have myriad benefits.

Watch the full hearing at the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/live/48As5PwgouA?t=5024s

06/14/2025

Thousands of people across the country are protesting ICE raids and thousands more are expected to hold demonstrations during Saturday’s “No Kings Day,” to oppose President Donald Trump’s draconian and harmful immigration policies. Trump’s deployment of military forces to suppress the protests is an authoritarian intimidation tactic aimed at silencing the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. He is doubling down by threatening to use “very big force” against those who protest his military parade in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. The National Guard is also being deployed by Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas.

Here is what to know about ways to protest and the First Amendment right to have your voice heard.

06/13/2025

Racism is in everything — politics, the economy, sports, food, entertainment — but are journalists doing a sufficient job of covering it? Amid an increasingly conspicuous attack on civil rights and freedoms by the Trump administration and others in power, Editor-in-Chief spoke with a number of Emancipator contributors about why journalists and media outlets must cover racism more intently and effectively.

06/09/2025

President Donald Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard and military personnel against those resisting aggressive and oppressive deportation tactics in Los Angeles is part of an authoritarian playbook used to crush dissent and cow citizens into silent compliance.

Rarely do presidents wield the ability to federally deploy the U.S. National Guard because of protests under the guise of what Trump calls “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Trump often sees rebellion when the lives of Black, Brown, and other marginalized people are at stake and the hue and cry is for freedom.

It is the tactic he used to try and quell peaceful protests in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd.

Trump’s escalation also took place ahead of a ban on people from mainly African and Middle Eastern countries entering the U.S. going into effect Monday.

The blueprint for violent force enacted against those seeking equity is etched in the nation’s prologue — from the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 to the Civil Rights Movement.

The question for us all living in Trump’s America: what will you do in this crucible moment?

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06/02/2025

Western readers have enormous power as gatekeepers and champions of literature from our homelands, which are far from voiceless. It’s our job — and our joy — to seek them out, writes author Malavika Kannan.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

05/28/2025

As the Trump administration’s deportation efforts continue, here’s a refresher — compiled by using information from the Florida Immigrant Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Immigration Law Center — on the rights of migrants.

Read the full conversation at the link in our bio.

05/27/2025

People with disabilities were among the first threatened and harmed by the Trump administration’s dismantling of legal guardrails and federal policies ensuring equitable protections and services. They were also the first to see this coming. To understand how we got here, and where we go from here, The Emancipator reached out to scholars, artists, and disability policy experts to help us unpack this moment, place it within a larger, historic continuum, and offer us strategic guidance on the way forward.

Here’s what they had to say.

Read more in link in bio.

05/22/2025

What can 1963 in America teach us about 2025 in America? How did a nation pivot so much closer (or further away) from true democracy and racial equity in only one year? Black studies scholar Peniel Joseph’s new book, “Freedom Season,” illuminates a pivotal point in the nation’s struggle for civil rights, connecting it to 2025.

Read his interview with Editor-in-Chief Jamil Smith.
https://theemancipator.org/2025/05/22/sections/culture/why-1963-was-americas-tipping-point/

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