Racism doesn't have a party

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.

Issue No. 020

Friday, September 11, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

This week I found myself writing about racism in three different rooms at once: a MAGA firebrand's feed, a progressive podcast, and the Supreme Court's own emergency docket. Different rooms, different politics, same old habit of treating Black people's dignity as negotiable. I didn't set out to write that way. The week just kept handing it to me.

I also want to tell you something I'm genuinely excited about. Starting this issue, we're launching a new weekly feature: Legends. Minyon Moore sent me seven women's stories that were too rich to compress into a headline or a bullet point, so instead of cutting them down, we built them a home. We start with Coretta Scott King, and I hope you'll come back for the next six Fridays for the rest.

And because I refuse to only write about what's under attack: Lonnie Bunch built one of this country's most important institutions from nothing and is retiring after a stellar career, with his head held high, 164 nations told the world Africa's true size after 450 years of a lie, and Coco Gauff fought her way to the semifinals of the US Open before falling just short. Some weeks give you both the fire and the reason to keep going.

THE HEADLINE

Racism Doesn't Have a Party

Two weeks. Two incidents. Two very different reactions.

When Trump ally Laura Loomer called five Black women, U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, Florida State Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon, former U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, "ghetto" and "unfit for the power they hold," nobody waited for an apology, because nobody expected one. The condemnation was instant, and it didn't stay in one lane. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican with no love for the women Loomer targeted, called it "nasty." Loomer never apologized. Instead, she doubled down, and days later added U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver to her list after McIver publicly defended the other women online. The outrage did the work. Loomer didn't need to be sorry to be exposed.

A few days later, on a progressive podcast, Rula Jebreal called House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries an "AIPAC monkey" and an "errand boy." Host Wajahat Ali sat there and nodded, later allowing that the word carried "racial connotations" before deciding Jebreal had "caught herself." The clip spread, and Jebreal took real heat for it online, from the Congressional Black Caucus and from plenty of social media influencers and ordinary people who saw the clip and called it what it was.

Then Jebreal posted what passed for an apology: a statement that opened by restating why she was angry at Jeffries over AIPAC, and only then, almost in passing, admitted that "a term" she'd used was "inappropriate." She never addressed him by name. She never apologized to him. She apologized about a term.

Let's be clear about that term. There is no version of these United States where calling a Black man "boy" is anything but a slur. Jebreal can explain the AIPAC part all she wants. She cannot explain away "boy."

And here's where it gets instructive. Three days after the apology, Joy Reid went on her own show and defended Jebreal, chalking the whole thing up to a "cultural disconnection" since Jebreal wasn't born in the US. "Sometimes even our friends can get it wrong," Reid said. That's the tell. When Loomer did it, nobody reached for a cultural excuse. When someone in the coalition did it, a prominent Black progressive voice reached for one immediately.

Racism doesn't check party registration before it opens its mouth. BLN isn't keeping score by team. We're asking whether the outrage is principle or just direction. Call it out when Laura Loomer does it. Call it out just as loud when it happens on a podcast featuring people who think of themselves as the good guys.

Nobody, not even our "friends," gets a pass. And that's on the period.

THE PROFILE

Lonnie Bunch III

Credit: [Courtesy of the Smithsonian — confirm before send]

WHO  Lonnie Bunch III

WHAT  14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

WHEN  Retiring at the end of 2026

FIRST  First African American, first historian to lead the Smithsonian in its 180-year history

In 2005, Lonnie Bunch was handed a museum that didn't exist. One staffer. No building. No collection. Just a mandate to build, from nothing, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. By the time it opened on the National Mall in 2016, it held tens of thousands of objects, from Nat Turner's Bible to Chuck Berry's Cadillac, and it has since drawn nearly 13 million visitors through its doors.

In 2019, Bunch became the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the first African American and the first historian ever to lead it in its 180-year history.

This week, he announced his retirement; he'll leave office at the end of the year. The announcement caps 18 months of escalating pressure from the Trump administration over how Smithsonian museums tell American history, including a White House report accusing the National Museum of American History of pushing "a radical, activist ideology," and a directive ordering exhibit reviews ahead of the country's 250th anniversary to "celebrate American exceptionalism" and strip out "divisive or partisan narratives."

Bunch spent his career arguing that the full American story, including its hardest chapters, is the exceptional one. He built an institution to prove it. Whether the next Smithsonian Secretary is allowed to keep proving it is the question his exit leaves behind.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

01  Five Seats, Zero Women

The GOP's first-ever midterm convention kicked off this week in Dallas with more than 100 speakers across two nights. Five Black men have national platforms on that stage: Rep. Byron Donalds, running for Florida governor. Sen. Tim Scott, chairing the NRSC. T.W. Shannon, running for Oklahoma lieutenant governor. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. Pastor Lorenzo Sewell.

Not one Black woman made the list. Not as a candidate, not as an official, not as a surrogate.

And the one Black Republican woman with the clearest case for a platform wasn't there. Lisa Demuth, Minnesota's House Speaker and the GOP's nominee for governor against Amy Klobuchar, the only Black Republican woman running on a statewide ticket this cycle, skipped the convention entirely. Whether she wasn't asked or chose to stay home isn't clear. What is clear: the party had an obvious opportunity to put a Black woman on that stage, and somehow didn't.

02  Africa Just Got Its True Size Back

For 450 years, the world's most common map has lied to you. The Mercator projection, still hanging in classrooms everywhere, shrinks Africa down to roughly the same size as Greenland. In reality, Africa is 14 times larger.

This week, the UN General Assembly voted 164-1 to retire it. Every member nation but one, the United States, backed adopting the Equal Earth projection instead, a map that shows the continent at its true scale. Togo led the push on behalf of the African Union, and it traces directly back to a December 2025 Pan-African Congress declaration in Lomé that called on African nations and diaspora communities alike to fight cartographic distortion as what it's always been: a design choice, not a neutral fact.

The US cast the lone no vote, and said so plainly. Deputy UN representative Yaryna Ferencevych called the resolution a "radical ideological project" tied to "reparations" and "cognitive justice," said it "mocks the work and purpose of this institution," and argued the UN should be focused on "genuine problems" instead of "map projects from the 16th century." Instead, the US chose to stand by the centuries-old lie.

Africa isn't small. It never was. The map just told you it was, and now 164 nations agree on why that mattered enough to fix.

03  Missouri Keeps Cleaver's Seat

The Supreme Court blocked Missouri's Republican-friendly congressional map not once but twice this week. Tuesday, Justice Kavanaugh denied the state's first emergency request. A federal judge then issued a conflicting order requiring the GOP map be used anyway, and Missouri's Secretary of State defied the state Supreme Court's block outright, triggering a contempt proceeding. Thursday, the Supreme Court stepped in again, siding with challengers a second time. The map that would have eliminated Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City-area seat is dead. Missouri will use its 2022 lines, and Cleaver's seat holds.

04  Racism Under the Skin, Literally

A study published September 6 in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior followed 201 Black women living with lupus over six years, tracking their disease activity alongside their experiences of gendered racism, the specific combination of racial and gender bias Black women navigate that neither racism-alone nor sexism-alone research fully captures. The more frequently women reported those experiences, the more active their disease was. That held even after researchers controlled for depression.

The sharpest finding: among the different forms of gendered racism measured, the one most consistently tied to worse disease activity was being reduced to assumptions about beauty and sexuality, stereotypes about Black women's bodies wearing on Black women's bodies.

Lupus already hits Black women hardest, with both higher rates and worse outcomes than white women. This is the first study to show that gendered racism specifically, not just discrimination in general, may be part of why.

Erving et al., Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sept. 6, 2026

05  The Mail-In Voting Fight Isn't Over

Two of the three Supreme Court cases over Trump's mail-in voting executive order are already decided, not on the merits, but on a technicality. In August, the Court let the order move forward 6-3, ruling it was too early for states to challenge it since it hadn't been implemented yet. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing the majority was "taking its eye off the ball" while the administration works "to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections."

The third case is still live, and it just got more layers. District Judge Indira Talwani has repeatedly blocked the Postal Service from enforcing the rule's voter-list and ballot-envelope requirements. This week, a federal appeals panel backed her up again, refusing to let the USPS plan move forward. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in for a third time regardless, arguing ballots are already mailing, North Carolina and Alabama have started, five more states follow this week, and that once those ballots are in the mail, there's no retrieving them.

Two courts have now said no. The Supreme Court still hasn't ruled. Ballots are already moving. This one's still unresolved heading into the send.

THE LEGENDS

The Women Before Us

A new weekly series, launched with The Colored Girls (Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, Tina Flournoy, and Minyon Moore)

Credit: IMDb

Several of the women you're about to meet are commonly introduced through the men beside them: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Rev. Jesse Jackson. That framing can unintentionally diminish the remarkable women themselves. Their marriages were important parts of their lives, but they were not the sum of their lives.

They were organizers, strategists, artists, intellectuals, mothers, fundraisers, institution-builders, political thinkers, advocates and moral leaders. They understood something generations of Black women have understood, sometimes leadership means standing at a microphone, and sometimes it means creating the conditions that allow an entire movement to survive.

Starting this week, and running one at a time over the next seven Fridays, Legends will introduce you to seven women who represent different expressions of Black female power. Coretta Scott King will show you vision and stewardship. Betty Shabazz will show you reinvention. Maya Angelou will show you voice. Willie T. Barrow will show you organizing power. Dorothy Height will show you institution-building without permission. Myrlie Evers-Williams will show you persistence and justice. Jacqueline Jackson will show you the often-unrecognized labor that sustains family and movement.

Their lives will also complicate the familiar idea of the "strong Black woman." Strength did not mean these women never suffered. They suffered enormously. Some buried husbands murdered because of their work. Some raised children under public scrutiny. Some experienced poverty, racism, sexism, threats and profound personal disappointment.

The lesson isn't that Black women should learn to endure more. The lesson is that Black women have always been more than what they endured. They thought. They organized. They created. They negotiated. They loved. They raised families. They built institutions. They preserved history. They demanded justice. And they imagined futures that they might never personally enjoy.

Perhaps most importantly, getting to know them restores women to the center of the story of Black freedom. The Civil Rights Movement was never simply a collection of extraordinary Black men supported by devoted women. Black women were architects of the movement itself.

A woman can be quiet and powerful. She can be outspoken and powerful. She can marry an extraordinary man without surrendering her own identity. She can choose singlehood or a child-free life or she can choose to be a wife and mother … while being an intellectual, organizer, and activist leader. She can experience devastating loss and begin again. She can work behind the scenes and transform history. She can stand in front of the world and speak. And she can decide that her own story deserves to be remembered.

That may be the most important reason for Black women, especially younger Black women, to know these names. Because long before they arrived, other Black women were already wrestling with questions they may recognize today: Who am I apart from the people I love? What do I owe my family? What do I owe my community? How do I survive loss without becoming defined by it? When should I speak? When should I organize? How do I preserve what came before me while still creating something of my own?

These seven women did not all answer those questions the same way. That's exactly why we start here.

"Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul."

— Coretta Scott King

THE WIN

Seven Black women competed at this year's US Open.

Coco Gauff's run ended in the semifinals, falling to new world No. 1 Elena Rybakina, one win short of a second final. Naomi Osaka won three matches before falling to Elena Rybakina in the fourth round. Taylor Townsend went further than she ever has at a Grand Slam tournament, reaching the quarterfinals before running into Aryna Sabalenka. Madison Keys lost in the third round, and Alycia Parks lost in the first.

Then there's Venus Williams, 46 years old and the oldest woman in the US Open singles field since 1981, just by walking onto that court. She and Serena reunited for doubles for the first time in four years, a full-circle moment no scoreline changes. Serena also teamed up with Carlos Alcaraz for mixed doubles and made a run to the quarterfinals before bowing out.

Seven women. Seven runs. Every one of them worth telling.

THE WATCH

The Census Fight Nobody's Ready For

The Trump administration proposed sweeping changes to the 2030 census this week: eliminating the race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation questions entirely, and dropping undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign visitors from the count used to allocate the 435 House seats. Race has been on the census since the first count in 1790.

WHY WE'RE WATCHING

This is the data foundation underneath everything else in this issue. Redistricting fights like Missouri's, Voting Rights Act enforcement, and civil rights litigation all run on census race data. If it disappears, the next redistricting cycle fights this same battle with no numbers to fight it with. Watch for the public comment period and whether Congress or the courts weigh in before it's finalized.

ONE THING TO READ

For your weekend.

Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society by Dr. Arline T. Geronimus (University of Michigan)

Geronimus spent three decades building the case that your zip code and your bank account can age your body faster than your habits ever could. She's the researcher who named "weathering," the slow physical toll of living inside a system built against you, showing up as inflammation, high blood pressure, and early disease long before it shows up in a diagnosis. This issue's lupus study is a live example of exactly what she's talking about: gendered racism showing up not as a feeling, but as a measurable disease outcome.

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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