On Our Radar

The income share of the poorest half of Americans is declining while the richest have grabbed more. In Europe, it’s not happening.

As city and state officials and members of both parties clamor for the federal government to help, Mr. Carson has privately told aides that he views the shortage of affordable housing as regrettable, but as essentially a local problem.

With its office about two and a half miles away in another part of Brooklyn, Williams’ JW Electric Corp. is a certified minority-owned subcontractor hired to set up the building’s electricity. The firm got $5.1 million in subcontracts for CAMBA Gardens II, its largest contract since Williams founded the business in 2002. The project employed up to 25 of his workers — most of them Brooklyn residents.

Historians who are not inclined to hero worship — including Elsa Barkley Brown, Lori Ginzberg and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn — have recently provided an unsparing portrait of this once-neglected period. Stripped of her halo, Stanton, the campaign’s principal philosopher, is exposed as a classic liberal racist who embraced fairness in the abstract while publicly enunciating bigoted views of African-American men, whom she characterized as “Sambos” and incipient rapists in the period just after the war. The suffrage struggle itself took on a similar flavor, acquiescing to white supremacy — and selling out the interests of African-American women — when it became politically expedient to do so. This betrayal of trust opened a rift between black and white feminists that persists to this day.

The state could become the first to overturn a ban by ballot initiative.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

The present, however, can be brutal. To my mind, the week’s most important tech story was the slaying of an 18-year-old woman at a BART station in San Francisco’s East Bay, just a few miles from Silicon Valley, as she was getting off a train. Nia Wilson was traveling with her older sisters Lahtifa and Nishiya when, in a shocking act of terror, a man slashed her neck. She died at the scene. Lahtifa Wilson was wounded. A transient with a history of violence has been arrested.

How does this relate to tech?

Portland officials are weighing an ambitious plan to pump more cash into programs intended to benefit residents displaced from the city’s historically black neighborhoods.

What can we learn from footage that captures the hazards of shopping (or barbecuing, or swimming, or sleeping) while black?

This season, a string of recordings documenting quotidian social aggressions has been accumulating in our social-media feeds, clip by clip, like some portentous summer garland. The videos are shakily produced—shot by the rightfully indignant, who, in a matter of minutes, have realized that they must take up the role of gonzo filmmaker in order to protect reputations, freedoms, and, potentially, lives. They have a sick synchronicity, revealing an irrefutable pattern of behavior in their protagonists. Let’s call them the cop-calling tapes.

Amazon.com’s facial recognition tools incorrectly identified Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and 27 other members of Congress as people arrested for a crime during a test commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the watchdog said Thursday.

Here’s how one socialist sums up his beliefs:

“I think we just need to realize that the end goal is, ultimately, like social control of the means of production,” said Joe Cernelli, a founding member of that West Virginia DSA chapter. “You know we don’t just want to improve capitalism, we will ultimately want to get rid of it.”

In the past decade, nearly 26,000 murders have gone without an arrest in major American cities. Of those, more than 18,600 of the victims — almost three?quarters — were black.

Bias in land use decisions is difficult to measure, but new research in Durham reveals that race has been a significant factor.

Alissa Quart’s new book chronicles the pain of a disgruntled class that could change the country’s political landscape.