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    Trump Casts Himself as a Protector of Persecuted White People

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    President Trump publicly dressed down the president of South Africa based on a fringe conspiracy theory, providing a vivid distillation of his views on race.In the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump positioned himself as the savior of white South Africans.Sitting alongside Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, Mr. Trump said white people were “being executed.” He referred over and over again to “dead white people.” He dressed down Mr. Ramaphosa, who helped his country cast off the racist policies of apartheid, and questioned why he was not doing more when white people were being killed.“I don’t know how you explain that,” Mr. Trump said. “How do you explain that?”The American president was not much interested in the answer, which is that police statistics do not show that white people are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in South Africa.The confrontation provided a vivid demonstration of Mr. Trump’s views on race, which have animated his political life going back years. After rising to power in part by framing himself as a protector of white America, Mr. Trump has used his platform, in this case the Oval Office, to elevate claims of white grievance.For Mr. Trump, white people are the true victims; Black people and minorities have received an unfair advantage in the United States. And when Mr. Trump looks to South Africa, a majority-Black country emerging from a legacy of apartheid and colonialism, he sees white people who need sanctuary in the United States.Invoking the teachings of his old mentor, Nelson Mandela, Mr. Ramaphosa pleaded for civility in the dialogue between the two leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

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      I don’t know why I was surprised when President Trump went after the Smithsonian Institution, in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture — or as it’s more informally known, the Black Smithsonian. If anything, I should have been surprised he held off for two months. On March 27, he issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that accused the Smithsonian Institution of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” He called out the Black Smithsonian in particular for being subject “to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The federal government, he declared, will no longer support historical projects that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”I think Mr. Trump’s presidency is a national tragedy. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I have some sympathy for the concerns he raised about the agenda of much historical thinking these days. Too often it indulges in sloppy and even childish stereotypes, depicting America’s past as one extended hit job.The boldness of the American experiment, the emergence of the Constitution, the evolution of public schooling, the expansion of the right to vote, the rise of the conservationism and the flourishing of our diverse cultural life — reducing all of this to the machinations of a sinister white cabal is, like the 1980s power ballad, seductive but vapid. That white lady at the supermarket with her 6-year-old daughter has organized her life around defending her privilege? I’m not seeing it.President Trump visited the National Museum of African American History in 2017.Doug Mills/The New York TimesI shudder at suggestions that — as a graphic on the Black Smithsonian’s own website put it a few years ago — “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis” and “decision-making” are the purview of white culture. I despise equally the idea that Black people are communal, oral, “I’ll get to that tomorrow” sorts who like to circle around the answer rather than actually arrive at it.And I am especially dismayed at how this version of history implies that the most interesting thing about the experience of Black Americans has been their encounter with whiteness. I figured that the president was being typically hyperbolic when he said that institutions like the museum deepen “societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe” — I mean, even something as stupid as that guide to whiteness might just be an outlying mistake. But I was wary that a national museum might squander its chance to illuminate complex topics and expand people’s curiosity, instead trying to corral everyone into caricatures and oversimplifications. As I read the executive order, however, it occurred to me that after all these years, I had yet to actually visit the museum. So, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I decided to zip over to the National Mall to take a look. I will not soon forget what I saw.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Afrikaners Arrive in U.S. as Trump-Approved Refugees

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      The first group of Afrikaners have arrived in the United States, claiming they were victims of persecution or had reason to fear persecution in their home country.President Trump signed an executive order in February establishing refugee status for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority in South Africa that created and led the brutal system of apartheid.As part of the executive order, the Trump administration created an expedited path for Afrikaners to resettle in the United States, even as the administration has barred most refugees from countries afflicted by war and famine.While waiting at the airport in Johannesburg, the passengers said the U.S. Embassy had instructed them not to speak with the news media. The first group of Afrikaners arrived in the United States on May 12.Here’s what you need to know:Who are the Afrikaners?What does land have to do with it?Why are Afrikaners being granted refugee status?How will they be resettled in the United States?Who are the Afrikaners?The Afrikaners who arrived in the United States on Monday are the descendants of the European colonizers who came to South Africa approximately four centuries ago. They later created the brutal system of apartheid in 1948.Decades after the end of apartheid, some Afrikaners now say they are being denied jobs and have been targeted by violence because of their race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      White Supremacist Is Charged in 2019 Arson at Tennessee Civil Rights Landmark

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      Regan Prater set fire to the main offices of the Highlander Research and Education Center and took credit for it in encrypted messages, prosecutors said.A Tennessee man with ties to several white supremacist groups has been charged with setting a fire in 2019 that destroyed the offices of a social justice center connected with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., according to court records.In a federal criminal complaint that was unsealed on April 24, the F.B.I. said that the man, Regan Prater, 27, set fire to the main offices of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., near Knoxville, and spray-painted an Iron Guard cross on the pavement outside.The symbol originated with fascists in Romania in the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Anti-Defamation League. It has more recently been used by white supremacists, including one who murdered 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019.Investigators in Tennessee said that Mr. Prater, of Tullahoma, took credit for the arson while chatting with an informant on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that he used to communicate with other white supremacists.“I didn’t admit that, but dots can be connected,” Mr. Prater wrote to the informant when asked if he had set the fire, according to the complaint.He then gave details about how he had started the blaze, telling the informant, “It was a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump vs. Harris Would Be Nothing Without Myths

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.Each candidate is trying to pitch the contest to voters as a heroic episode in the unfolding of American history and invites them to imagine themselves as players in the narrative.In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do.Among the big issues at stake in the 2024 election, for both the campaigns and the country, is no less than shaping what it means to be an American and who gets to have power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Has Right-Wing Friends in High Places

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      The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Willful Amnesia Behind Trump’s Attacks on Kamala Harris’s Identity

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      When I was a child, my dad sat my older sister and me down in our living room and explained to us the rules of race in America. A Black man born into a Mississippi where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman, he met my white mom in 1972. That was just a few years after the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia finally struck down 300 years’ worth of laws prohibiting people who descended from slavery from marrying people whose ancestors had enslaved them. In other words, Dad held no illusions about how race worked in our society and felt it was his duty as a parent to prepare us. Our mother might be white, he told us, but in this country, that fact was irrelevant to how we would be seen and treated. She might be white, but we were Black.What my dad said that day when I was an elementary school student merely confirmed an understanding that I already had. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandmama from my dad’s side as just another child in a big Black family, my mom most often the only white person at family events. Several times a year, we’d travel about an hour out of town to rural Iowa, where we’d spend time with my white grandparents, who loved us dearly but who existed in a completely white world that we were never quite fully a part of.I cannot say exactly how I knew I was Black before my dad sat us down, but I knew. Everyone knew. With my white family I was not white but part white. With my Black family and in the rest of America, I was Black. In American society, this race rule is so embedded that it is not even questioned.Last week, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, told a room full of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” When he did so, he was embracing a convenient historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.By suggesting that there was something nefarious or politically contrived about a mixed-race person claiming Blackness as her identity, he was acting as if that choice hadn’t been made for Harris when she was born to a Black father. We saw this same orchestrated amnesia when Barack Obama set out to become the first Black president. It seems that when a mixed-race Black American appears to be ascending to the pinnacles of American power, some white Americans suddenly forget the race rules that white society created.Trump’s questioning of Harris’s Black bona fides was swiftly denounced because Harris has long identified as Black, recounting a similar story to mine about her Indian mother explaining Harris’s Blackness to her as a child. In her 2019 autobiography, Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” And of course, Harris would go on to graduate from one of the most prestigious historically Black universities where she had joined the nation’s oldest Black sorority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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      New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.The NewsThanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”Flowers for Karon Blake, 13, who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in January 2023. Gun-related deaths were two to four times higher among Black and Native American youth than among white youth.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressSome Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charges Against Two White Nationalists Are Dismissed as ‘Selective Prosecution’

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      A federal judge found that prosecutors were biased in pursuing charges against the two men and not against far-left activists who had also committed acts of violence at the same events.A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed riot charges against two members of a neo-Nazi street gang who had attacked counterprotesters at several pro-Trump rallies in California in 2017, saying that the government had behaved improperly by neglecting to bring charges against left-wing activists who had also acted violently at the same events.The ruling by the judge, Cormac J. Carney, found that prosecutors had unfairly engaged in “a selective prosecution” against the two men — members of the Rise Above Movement, or R.A.M. — and targeted them chiefly because of their vitriolic speech and white supremacist ideology.While Judge Carney acknowledged that he found the ideas that the movement promoted “reprehensible,” he also said it was “constitutionally impermissible” to bring charges against one group, but not the other, based on politics alone.“The government cannot prosecute R.A.M. members such as defendants while ignoring the violence of members of antifa and related far-left groups because R.A.M. engaged in what the government and many believe is more offensive speech,” he wrote.The decision by Judge Carney, who sits in Federal District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., immediately wiped out the case against the two men, Robert Rundo, the founder of R.A.M. and an infamous figure in neo-Nazi circles, and Robert Boman, one of his subordinates. It was also a rare successful use of the selective prosecution tactic and leaned heavily on an appeal to the First Amendment. “It does not matter who you are or what you say,” Judge Carney wrote. “It does not matter whether you are a supporter of All Lives Matter or a supporter of Black Lives Matter. It does not matter whether you are a Zionist professor or part of Students for Justice in Palestine. It does not matter whether you are a member of R.A.M. or antifa. All are the same under the Constitution, and all receive its protections.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More