(This conversation was originally broadcast on July 6, 2023.)
Welcome to this encore edition of Midday. Tom's guest today is Wesley Lowery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former correspondent for the Washington Post, Boston Globe and CBS news, who is currently Executive Director of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an innovative training program at American University in Washington DC. Lowery has just published a thoughtful, imaginative and sobering book about the rise of white nationalist violence.
While violence against people of color has long been a staple of the American story, Lowery examines the pernicious increase in racial violence since the years of the Obama presidency.
He explores about a half dozen incidents of racial violence all over the country in which people of color were brutally and fatally attacked, illuminating and honoring the suffering of the victims and those close to them, and chronicling why the perpetrators carried out these heinous acts.
It's an insightful look at our national story and our national shame, replete with original reporting and original thinking about what Lowery calls “the defining force of our time.”
The book is American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress.Wesley Lowery joined Tom in Studio A in early July, when he was in town for an appearance at the Enoch Pratt Library.
Because this conversation was recorded earlier, we won't be taking any calls or emails.
