The Emancipator

🚨Big news from The Emancipator! 🚨

We’re thrilled to welcome Halimah “Lima” Abdullah, award-winning journalist & newsroom leader, as Managing Editor. And Chandelis Duster, award-winning journalist, as Senior Correspondent.

The Emancipator is proud to announce their appointments as we gear up to relaunch in the new year. Halimah and Chandelis are helping to drive The Emancipator’s mission: impactful journalism that exposes racism, and amplifies antiracist voices and solutions.

With these critical hires, The Emancipator, under the editorial direction of our co-founder Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, enters a new era at the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study. Stay tuned!

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.

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.

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