The Supreme Court needs to make clear it won't shield bad cops
We have a variety of content today, including an editorial about police accountability and qualified immunity. We also have a column about reminding your loved ones about your feelings for them and another about the racial trauma one reporter experienced during her childhood.
The Supreme Court needs to make clear it won't shield bad cops
By The Editorial Board
For decades, the Supreme Court has shielded police and prison guards from accountability even when they violate people’s rights in the most outrageous ways.
But in recent rulings, the court signaled it may finally have had enough of the bizarre shield it created for cops and corrections officers – a doctrine known as qualified immunity.
Today's Editorial Cartoon
As death tightens around us, don't hesitate to tell loved one how you feel
By Mitch Albom
As he lay dying, slowly, from ALS, I once asked my old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, what he thought about people wanting to leave the world with famous last words.
“I think,” he said, his voice raspy and weak, “you need really good timing.”
He was right. None of us know when our final moment will descend, and when it does, what we’re saying is rarely the concern.
The same goes in reverse. Trying to time your last words to a dying loved one is a tricky business. I have learned a valuable lesson in this.
Don’t wait.
Reporting for NBC's Southlake podcast on racial tensions revived my own childhood memories
By Antonia Hylton
It’s been a little more than a decade, but when I look back on the final months before my high school graduation I still feel bitter. I should have been celebrating my greatest achievement up to that point: I had finished four years of hard work and I was heading off to Harvard. Instead, I was humiliated.
A group of classmates was furious about my college acceptance. I was one of the few Black kids in a class of more than 400 students, and I had taken – and excelled in – advanced courses with many of them. Just hours after my acceptance, they started telling everyone in school that I’d only gotten in because I was Black.
As an insecure 17-year-old I was mostly preoccupied with the public humiliation, but I had enough sense to know that the rage they felt was about something much bigger than me or my Black family.
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This newsletter was compiled by Jaden Amos.