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White people designed blackface to keep black people down, to intimidate, mock and stereotype. It began during the 19th century and wasn’t about white people honoring the talent of black people by dressing up to look like them. It was about mocking them and depicting them as lazy, stupid and less than fully human. It was a tool of oppression. As a college kid in Virginia during the 1980s, I knew that and so did my classmates. But a whole lot of white people seem to not know that history or understand why blackface is so offensive, whether it’s practiced by a college student or a new doctor

The turmoil in Virginia — where I have lived most of my adult life, including nine years in Richmond — may do some good if it reminds white people that a river of oppression runs through U.S. history, deep and wide, down to today.

There is no doubt that Virginia’s leaders need to be held accountable for their personal history, but every Virginia leader is responsible for the racist symbols that still loom over our lives.

It’s a textbook case of entitlement, closely intertwined with a logic that undermines affirmative action. For while children from wealthy families float to college on rafts of invisible advantages that we pretend are talents, minority kids are constantly told that they don’t really deserve to be there. 

the students who come in through the “front door” at elite colleges, by simply applying and being accepted, have also often bought their way in.

Rich parents spend millions on their children to make them “better” than others

Three weeks before, his daughter Jaime had been shot to death in her high school hallway. The 14-year-old had been running away from the shooter, her father said, when a bullet severed her spinal cord

His daughter and her classmates had been hunted in their own school, and politicians needed to admit that guns were the problem and ban military-style assault weapons.

Pressure on politicians will reach a crescendo later this month when the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas lead the March For Our Lives in Washington on 24 March.

After The Post presented Facebook with a list of numerous fake accounts, the company revealed that its system is much less effective than previously advertised: The tool looks only for impostors within a user’s circle of friends and friends of friends — not the site’s 2 billion-user network, where the vast majority of doppelganger accounts are probably born.

But the fakes highlight how the company is struggling to use the technology to fulfill its most basic mission — connecting real people around the world.

The limited scale of Facebook’s central technical solution to the fake-account mess also suggests that the site is failing in its pledge to protect users’ personal information, while still urging them to hand over more photos and consent to their broader use.

So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.

Why did the Department of Justice cut such a deal? Acosta claimed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office worried it would have trouble proving federal charges against Epstein. With all respect to Acosta—who, in full disclosure, was a law-school classmate—that explanation is not credible. Federal prosecutors are famously reluctant to bring hard-to-prove cases, unlike district attorneys, who are generally eager to roll the dice. But no federal prosecutor would hesitate to pursue allegations of pervasive, organized child-sex abuse, backed by firsthand witnesses. It is more plausible that Epstein successfully wielded his nearly incomprehensible money and power to influence the decision at the highest levels. The personal attacks on the prosecution likely helped too: Federal prosecutors aren’t used to being on the defensive.

even here in Oklahoma, there's a growing hunger for accurate information on climate change: "I don't get the resistance I got at the beginning of my career because it's getting harder and harder to deny."

As they scooted out of the classroom on the first day of Lau’s two-day lesson, a few of the sixth-graders said this was the first they had heard of climate change. Others said they knew a little about it.

In teaching about climate change, Lau says she is fortunate to have support from her school’s administration. She has also learned how to choose her words carefully, especially given that so many people in the state (including members of her family) earn a living from carbon-intensive industries such as farming and oil and gas.

Mr. Pryor still recalls that even among good high school debaters, there was something different about his teammate Liz. “She wanted to be the best,” he said last month. “She wanted it more than I did. She wanted it more than anybody did.”

in her early life and as a young adult, Ms. Warren was not bucking the system or the conservative community she inhabited. She was striving within it, using it to launch herself out into the world.

She fought to go to college out of state, but dropped out at 19 when her high school boyfriend reappeared with a proposal for marriage. That moment reflects the central struggle of her early life, a tension between her ambitions in the world versus her understanding of a woman’s role in the home.

The students were assembled in the auditorium of their high school on Chicago’s North Side, there to celebrate Hispanic heritage — but first, their teachers told them, they had to stand for the national anthem.

When one student — a Latina and U.S. citizen — refused a teacher’s pointed direction to stand, she said he replied with an infamously racist line: “Go back to your country.” The same teacher turned to a black student, who was also sitting down, and asked whether she was part of the public school system’s free and reduced lunch program, telling her she should stand for the people who have died for the country, the students said.They were then told to leave the assembly.

The teacher’s alleged remark appears to be just the latest example of caustic rhetoric that began in the White House and seeped into schools, fueling attacks and bullying against students of color. Since 2016, President Trump’s words have been used to harass children and teens at least 300 times, according to a recent Washington Post analysis.

“I don’t know if we should trust the government,”

It wasn’t your choice to come to America. But once you realize you’re here illegally, it becomes your choice to figure out who gets to know that.

Can you tell your classmates that you can’t join the overseas choir trip because you don’t have a valid passport? Can you tell your coach that you have to stay in the area and can’t be recruited by an out-of-state college? Can you tell a human resources manager that you can’t get a driver’s license because you don’t have a Social Security number?

What few older people see in today’s “P.C.” students is their overwhelming urge to be kind to each other. They may have spent their middle and high school years being bullied, or bullying others; for kids in their low-to-mid-teens, the internet is a bullying machine. But by college, their sense of morality has blossomed. And many adolescents want to sort the world categorically into good and bad, at once eager to draw boundaries and empathize with whatever others might possibly feel.

Adults may make fun of trigger warnings, but most kids support them because they’re about extending a hand to others, undergirding an ethic of caring and decency. Calling out “micro-aggressions” among classmates and policing tone on social media appeal to them in much the same way.

They don’t understand why older people deride their generation as “crybullies,” in the conservative publisher Roger Kimball’s words, or as “fragile thugs,” a phrase David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, has used.

After the attack on three Georgia spas on Tuesday, which took the lives of eight people, Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old charged with the slayings, told the police that the women murdered were “temptations” he needed to “eliminate.”

For too long, women have been punished and killed because of men’s inability to deal with issues around rejection, desire and shame. Women of color are especially at risk; they’re disproportionately attacked and more likely to be blamed for the violence perpetrated against them.

Thanks to decades of academic and activist work, we know more than ever about why men lash out at women in this way and how we can curb the violence. Still, the occurrence of mass killings targeting women shows no sign of stopping.

In March 2008, Dennis Richmond Jr. watched “Roots” with his father, and it changed his life. It was a Sunday, the Richmonds’ day for leafing through family photographs in their apartment in Yonkers, N.Y., looking at relatives going back about a century. “Roots,” Alex Haley’s semifictional account of his family’s journey from West Africa, posed a challenge: How far back could young Dennis trace his own ancestors?

When he thought about his grandmother having parents, who in turn had parents, he was floored. “It blew my mind,” he said. “The seed was planted. And I’ve been steadfast ever since.”

For Dennis, finding his ancestors became a refuge from his school life, where classmates bullied him both physically and verbally for his studiousness and the way he carried himself.

NPR Short Wave host and reporter Emily Kwong is a third generation Chinese American, but she's never spoken her family's language.

At age 30, she's trying to learn the language for the first time, and unpacking why she never learned it in the first place.

Emily's father, Christopher Kwong, stopped speaking his first language — Mandarin Chinese — when he was five-years-old. Born in New York City in 1958, he struggled to communicate with his kindergarten teacher and classmates.

The speech that high school valedictorian Paxton Smith pulled from inside her graduation gown was not the one she had shown the school. So she took a deep breath before launching into it, wondering whether she would be allowed to share her thoughts about Texas' new restrictive abortion law.

"I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights,"

Despite swapping her text, Smith finished her speech and got a rousing cheer from her classmates and staff. In the days since her address on Sunday, video of the event has gone viral, and Smith has been praised for speaking her mind.

The suspect was prone to angry outbursts, according to former classmates.

The suspect charged in the murders of 10 people at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store — the second mass shooting to shake the country in less than a week — is a 21-year-old man from a nearby Denver suburb who used an AR-15 type of assault rifle, law enforcement officials said.

Among the victims of the massacre on Monday was Officer Eric Talley, 51, with the Boulder Police Department, who had responded to a “barrage” of 911 calls about the shooting, Chief Maris Herold said.

A three-judge panel in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to dismiss the Juliana v. US lawsuit on Friday, a seminal case involving 21 young people who sued the federal government for violating their right to a safe climate. The decision is a blow to climate activists and shows the limits of the courts’ willingness to assign legal responsibility to the government for the harms caused by greenhouse gases.

The judges all agreed that climate change is an urgent, threatening problem, but ruled that the plaintiffs, who were between the ages of 8 and 19 when the suit was filed, didn’t have standing to sue.

unprecedented and contrary to American principles of justice.

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.”

It turned into a federal lawsuit with unusually detailed documentation.

And now it has ended in a settlement that underscores the contentiousness of the national debate over campus sexual misconduct cases

Columbia has restored the diploma of Ben Feibleman, whom a three-member university panel had found responsible for sexually assaulting a female classmate. It has also agreed to pay him an undisclosed cash award and to send a statement to prospective employers describing him as an alumnus in good standing, Mr. Feibleman’s lawyer and a spokesman for the university said.

PARIS — A knife-wielding man decapitated a teacher near a school in a suburb north of Paris on Friday afternoon and was later shot dead by the police

A police officer and parents with knowledge of the attack confirmed French media reports that the victim was a history teacher at the school who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression, which had incited anger among some Muslim families.

In a video that widely circulated on YouTube before the attack, a Muslim parent at the teacher’s school, College du Bois-d’Aulne, expresses anger that an unidentified teacher had asked Muslims in the class of 13-year-olds to leave because “he was going to show a photo that would shock them.”