Dear Progressive Reader,

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office for what can only be termed “another in a series of unilateral ambush meetings targeting a world leader of an allied nation.” During the meeting, Trump called for the lights to be lowered and screened a video making debunked claims of “white genocide” in Ramaphosa’s country. My thoughts immediately went to February 18, 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson presented the first-ever screening of a film at the White House—the racist, pro-Ku Klux Klan epic, The Birth of a Nation. The distribution of this film has been tied by historians to a rise in the lynchings of Black people and a resurgence of the Klan in the years that followed. I was not the only one to draw these connections, Cornell William Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School raised the point with CNN’s Anderson Cooper shortly after the White House meeting noting, “it sends a message that the President is continuing to rewrite history . . . so the country should be horrified.” In a related story, The Guardian reported last week the presidential adviser Elon Musk’s personal AI product “Grok” had been, as it stated, “ ‘instructed by my creators’ to accept the genocide [of white farmers in South Africa] ‘as real and racially motivated.’ ” Musk himself was raised in South Africa and has been shown to have been influenced by its history of Apartheid.

This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by police officer Derek Chauvin. As Sarah Lahm reports, “George Floyd was one man whose life was stolen from him, and his murder matters because of that. But the trajectory that took him from one formerly vibrant Black community to another, and then to an untimely death in South Minneapolis, where he had hoped to make a better life for himself, also belongs to a larger story of systemic racial injustice throughout the country.” As Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Samuels is now at The New Yorker) write in their Pulizer-Prize-winning book, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, the weight of systemic racism shaped the way Floyd lived and responded to the situations he encountered. Samuels told NPR’s Morning Edition, “He had been haunted by the image of Philando Castile and would tell people, ‘I just feel the police are waiting to kill another big guy like me.’ ” Castile was tragically killed by another Minneapolis police officer just a little less than four years before, at a spot just 15 minutes (8.5 miles) away. Castile’s killer, Jeronimo Yanez was not convicted of any crime.

Elsewhere on our website this week, Isabel Rodriiguez, an intern at The Progressive, writes about the impacts on international journalism of the shuttering of the Voice of America; Melinda Tuhus reports from Connecticut on a community organizing to respond to Trump’s threats of mass deportations; and Kelly Candaele remembers an afternoon spent with the former president of Uruguay Pepe Mujica who passed away of cancer on May 13. Plus Brianna Nargiso Newton looks at the threats to future teachers in Trump’s cuts to funding for the Department of Education; Vijay Das pens an op-ed on the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that make it more difficult for low-income people to eat healthy food; and Akilah Monifa asks the question: “When will we be equal?”

Monday is Memorial Day, and as we do every year, The Progressive will join the local Madison chapter of Veterans for Peace for a commemoration and a call for the end to all wars. First commemorated nationally on May 30, 1868, following the Civil War, the holiday today is observed in many ways, by many groups. But here at The Progressive, we particularly honor the words of the May 22, 1950, presidential proclamation, “Since war is the world's most terrible scourge, we should do all in our power to prevent its recurrence.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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