Telegraphing the Endgame
This happened. It happened in the Oval Office of the White House yesterday (5/21/25). It was the lowest point in the history of the American Presidency since President Woodrow Wilson hosted another screening of white nationalist propaganda at the White House—the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation”.
“Birth of a Nation” depicted Black men as blood-thirsty savages hunting and killing white men and raping white women. The film offered cultural justification for the ethnic cleansing of Black people in the U.S., which was taking place across the South and throughout the Midwest at the time. These race massacres were largely led by police officers, other public officials, and pastors.
Yesterday, DT screened a similar propaganda clip that claimed to be evidence of a genocide against white Afrikaners (the Dutch-descended group of white South Africans whose families established and benefited from Apartheid). I appreciate the way South African president Cyril Ramaphosa pushed back. He brought conservative white South African golfers to offer their own testimony to the president that the video he showed is not what it claims to be. White South Africans are not experiencing genocide in SA. That was a savvy move. It was also the move of one intimately acquainted with white nationalism. He knew the only authoritative voice for a white nationalist is a white man—preferably a rich one.
The Administration’s Department of Justice Civil Rights Division made another announcement while DT lectured the South African president for one hour. The DOJ announced they were dropping federal oversight agreements with the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville that had been established in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They also announced they are dropping investigations into several other problematic U.S. police departments.
If this was a game of chess, DT just telegraphed his endgame. Think: Woodrow Wilson-era race massacres.
Video by Reuters, reposted from NYTimes.
The Narrative Gap, as coined by Lisa Sharon Harper, is the distance between the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, including how we got here and what it will take to make things right. In our world today, competing narratives vie for our loyalty, dividing society and the church, therefore making justice impossible. Our mission is help communities shrink the narrative gap, by identifying core issues and building community capacity so they might work toward common solutions for a just world. Here on the Freedom Road Substack, we can converse together on ways to shrink that narrative gap and help ensure everyones’ stories are told.
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