Videos about Tuskegee Airmen and civilian female pilots were not shown in basic training in Texas pending a review

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The US air force on Sunday said it would resume instruction of trainees using a video about the first Black airmen in the nation’s military, known as the Tuskegee Airmen , which has passed review to ensure compliance with the ban on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that Donald Trump imposed early in his second presidency.

Trump, who retook office on 20 January, has prohibited DEI throughout the US government and military. Pete Hegseth, the new defense secretary, who was sworn in on Friday, has made eliminating DEI from the military a top priority.

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Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.

But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.

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In his first few days in office, the president reversed four years of work on DEI efforts in the federal government

Within his first few days in office, Donald Trump reversed four years of work to increase diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the federal government.

Since taking office, he’s signed a flurry of executive orders, two of which amount to crackdowns on DEI within the federal government. One overturns Joe Biden’s efforts to increase DEI programs in the federal government, while a second bans DEI measures from being taken by the federal government.

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Joe Biden’s pardon of Marcus Garvey capped a decades-long campaign to restore the reputation of one of the most significant Black leaders of the 20th century

In the days before President Joe Biden’s final moments in office, Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor, received a call from a White House staffer. They told Hansford that Marcus Garvey, the revolutionary Jamaican leader who pushed for the unity of Black people and a collective return to Africa, would soon be posthumously pardoned for mail fraud.

Hansford dialed in Garvey’s son, Dr Julius Garvey, for a three-way call to break the news to him before it hit the newspaper circuit. As he thought of his nearly two decades of legal and advocacy work to help exonerate Garvey, Hansford remembered Garvey’s wife Amy Jacques who began the efforts to pardon him in 1923.

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In the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the US artist is in the UK with a show drawing on the legacy of Malcolm X – and an alternative vision for making America great again

When you are in this line of work, a question people sometimes ask is: “Of all the people you have interviewed and written about, who was the most inspiring?” And when they do, my memory often goes back to a day I spent 10 years ago driving around the south side of Chicago with the radical potter, and revolutionary urban planner, and guerrilla archivist, and situationist gospel singer, Theaster Gates.

At the time, Gates, then 41, charismatic and intellectually irrepressible, was about seven years into a project to transform the neighbourhood in which he lived – blighted by years of neglect and unemployment and poverty and related crime – into a working community of makers and artists, a place that looked after itself. While employed as a city planner and academic at the University of Chicago Gates had, he explained to me as he drove, become haunted by a fundamental question: why is it so often that the people with the least amount of imagination and the most concern for the bottom line – real estate developers – get to choose how to transform derelict urban areas? Why not the people who might care about those areas most: the citizens who grew up there and live there?

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How people dress – their bodies, their communities, their houses – mattered a great deal to the Nobel prize winner

“The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody’s shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mãe, is angry at what she says are my prettify ways.”

This is how readers are introduced to Florens, an enslaved girl with tender feet in A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s ninth novel. How people dress – their bodies, their communities, their houses – mattered a great deal to Morrison, which is evident in the way she focused on how her characters presented themselves to others.

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Police in Pearl, Mississippi, say ‘welcome aboard’ to Jeremy Rast, who lost job last year from nearby Richland agency

A Mississippi police department has proudly announced its hiring of an officer who was fired from another agency last summer after video captured him telling at least one Latino man that he encountered on duty to “go back to Mexico”.

A social media post on Thursday from the police department of Pearl asked community members to join the agency in “giving a warm welcome” to its newest member, Jeremy Rast, whose recorded comments while patrolling the streets of nearby Richland, Mississippi, in June cost him his job as an officer there.

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What the pushback against a more equal society could mean for a world fraught with power imbalances

When American voters headed to the ballot box in November, polls suggested the cost of living, immigration and reproductive rights ranked among their biggest concerns.

But tucked within this week’s barrage of executive orders was an attack on an initiative that had in recent years become increasingly weaponised around the world: measures that sought to tackle discrimination.

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The new administration has said so-called sanctuary cities will be the first targets of its mass-deportation program

Chicago’s Lower West Side felt uneasily quiet this week.

Christina Alejandra, a dancer and local business owner in the city’s artsy, majority Mexican American neighborhood, wondered whether it was because of the freezing temperatures, or the impending threat of immigration raids.

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