A recent Stanford University study using body camera footage to evaluate Oakland PD’s interactions with the public during traffic stops found police to be “significantly less respectful and consistently ruder toward black motorists.” While Black Lifes Matter drew attention to fatal shootings (which studies have so far failed to show to be skewed disproportionately toward Americans of African Ancestry), lower—but highly egregious—levels of police abuse appear to be ubiquitous and disproportionately targeted toward this cohort of our fellow citizens. The Los Angeles Times reports.

May 24, 2017 – The Social Democrat joins the many who have spoken up in praise of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s eloquent defense of his ordered removal of the city’s four monuments to slavocracy—in the face of hate and invective from the psychologically diseased defenders of the “Old South.”

May 17, 2017 – Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, calls the removal of monuments to the Confederacy “a long-overdue act of moral hygiene.”

In this heartbreaking article, Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler describes being profiled and harrassed by police officers while walking home from work in a Washington DC neighborhood.

A much-watched lawsuit growing out of the 2008 housing crash has run aground at the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals. The City of Los Angeles claimed that Wells Fargo and Bank of America had intentionally pushed pricey or risky mortgages to ethnic minorities.

The Trump budget, released in May, includes a provision to disband a 600-person division within the Labor Department tasked with policing discrimination among government contractors. Civil rights enforcement is also being gutted at the EPA, the Department of Education and other government agencies, reports the Washington Post.

Supporters of monuments to the Confederacy long for “America as it used to be.” As Christine Ember writes in this Washington Post column, that hallowed past is a place where people of European descent enjoyed priveleged status.