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Ukraine received at least 20 bodies of Russian soldiers in recent exchanges, Zelenskyy says

Ukraine received at least 20 bodies of Russian soldiers in recent exchanges, Zelenskyy says

Independenta day ago

Ukraine's president said that Russia repatriated at least 20 of its own dead soldiers in recent exchanges with Ukraine, describing it as a result of Moscow 's disorganization in carrying out large swaps of wounded POWs and remains of troops.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that an Israeli citizen was among the dead Ukraine had received in recent exchanges. He spoke to journalists on Friday but his comments were embargoed until Saturday. Officials did not disclose the identities of the bodies.
'They threw the corpses of their citizens at us. This is their attitude toward war, toward their soldiers. And this is already documented. Sometimes these bodies even have Russian passports,' he said.
He said the Russian side insisted the dead were all Ukrainians.
Journalists were shown a Russian passport and ID belonging to one of the 20 dead Russians. According to the document, the man came from the Moscow region.
Zelenskyy doubts Putin wants peace
The exchanges of the dead and wounded soldiers are the only tangible result of direct peace talks in Istanbul. In June, Ukraine and Russia agreed to exchange the bodies of fallen soldiers in a 6,000-for-6,000 format during the second round of negotiations. Ukraine was concerned that the number was too high and that the sides did not have enough time for forensic examinations and checking the identities of the dead.
Zelenskyy said he suspected Russia's plan was to play along with peace talks to appease the U.S. and stave off more sanctions but without ending the war that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes he is winning.
He said that because of this, Ukraine would be 'in a really difficult situation' of deciding whether to continue the talks in Istanbul.
Impact of Iran-Israel war on Ukraine
Zelenskyy said Ukraine was against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, because of its military partnership with Russia, but stopped short of expressing explicit support for Israel's strikes. He repeated that the new war in the Middle East will affect Ukraine indirectly.
'Iran gave the Russians everything to kill us. They gave them martyrs, they gave them missiles, and they gave them licenses. The fact that their production capacities have now become weaker is (a) positive for us. But at certain points it may already be too late,' he said, also citing Russia's military cooperation with North Korea.
Russia has modified Iran-made Shahed drones and has used them, often hundreds at a time, in barrages targeting Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said 39 Russian companies were involved in the production of Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. He said 21 of them are not under sanctions. 'And therefore it is absolutely incomprehensible why sanctions should not be imposed urgently,' he said.
Russia attacked Ukraine with the missile in November, marking a serious escalation in the war and Russia's capabilities.
Ukraine looks to Europe to boost domestic weapons
Zelenskyy dispelled reports that Patriots air defense systems were destroyed in recent Russian drone and missile barrages. He also said Ukraine has started using domestically produced interceptors to shoot down Shahed drones and is seeking financing from Germany to ramp up the weapon's production.
He added he sent signals to Western partners asking them to give up 0.25% of their GDP to support Ukraine's local defense industry.
Zelenskyy said it's likely he would attend a NATO summit later this week, but that he would make a final decision on Monday.
Though Zelenskyy did not meet Trump who had left early the Group of Seven summit in Canada last week, Ukraine's Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and the head of the president's office, Andriy Yermak, gave U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a list of weapons Ukraine is hoping to purchase. 'We will wait feedback,' Zelenskyy said, adding the package of weapons included Patriot systems.
The weapons package would be among the topics Zelenskyy plans to discuss with Trump in their next meeting, he added, as well as the issue of sanctions.
'Frankly, it seems to me that we need to talk about a new breath in the diplomatic track,' he said. 'We need greater certainty and greater pressure from the world on Putin.'
___

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Hundreds protest in The Hague against NATO, days before the Dutch city hosts alliance summit
Hundreds protest in The Hague against NATO, days before the Dutch city hosts alliance summit

The Independent

time21 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Hundreds protest in The Hague against NATO, days before the Dutch city hosts alliance summit

Hundreds of people protested Sunday against NATO and military spending and against a possible conflict with Iran, two days before a summit of the alliance in The Hague that is seeking to increase allies' defense budgets. 'Let's invest in peace and sustainable energy,' Belgian politician Jos d'Haese told the crowd at a park not far from the summit venue. Although billed as a demonstration against NATO and the war in Gaza, protesters were joined by Iranians who held up banners saying 'No Iran War,' the day after the United States launched attacks against three of Iran's nuclear sites. 'We are opposed to war. People want to live a peaceful life,' said 74-year-old Hossein Hamadani, an Iranian who lives in the Netherlands. Look at the environment. 'Things are not good. So why do we spend money on war?' he added. The Netherlands is hosting the annual meeting of the 32-nation alliance starting Tuesday, with leaders scheduled to meet Wednesday. The heads of government want to hammer out an agreement on a hike in defense spending demanded by U.S. President Donald Trump. The deal appeared largely done last week, until Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that committing Madrid to spending 5% of its gross domestic product on defense "would not only be unreasonable, but also counterproductive.' U.S. allies have ramped up defense spending since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago, but almost a third of them still don't meet NATO's current target of at least 2% of their gross domestic product. The summit is being protected by the biggest ever Dutch security operation, code named 'Orange Shield," involving thousands of police and military personnel, drones, no-fly zones and cybersecurity experts. ___ Associated Press writer Molly Quell in The Hague contributed.

US strikes on Iran an ‘extraordinarily dangerous escalation'
US strikes on Iran an ‘extraordinarily dangerous escalation'

The Independent

time40 minutes ago

  • The Independent

US strikes on Iran an ‘extraordinarily dangerous escalation'

The US strikes on Iran represent an 'extraordinarily dangerous escalation' of the conflict in the Middle East, the Irish foreign affairs minister has said. Simon Harris, who is also Ireland's deputy premier, said an escalation in the 'tinderbox' region was more likely than ever and that the international community were at risk of 'losing all control' of the conflict. Irish premier Micheal Martin and Mr Harris both called for an 'urgent' de-escalation and a negotiated solution on Iran's nuclear facilities. They said they are in close contact with their European counterparts before a meeting of EU foreign leaders on Monday and of EU leaders later in the week. ' Diplomacy and dialogue is ultimately the only way to resolve these issues,' Mr Martin said. 'Iran should commit not to develop nuclear weapons and disavow its nuclear and uranium enrichment programme. 'Nuclear safety is an issue here, modern warfare is very destructive. It is civilians who ultimately suffer, and that is why we need an end to these wars and bring an end to conflict.' Mr Martin said the escalation on Sunday should not draw attention away from the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. 'We shouldn't lose sight of the catastrophe that is still unfolding in Gaza while the war between Iran and Israel continues,' he said. 'What is happening in Gaza is appalling and a breach of international humanitarian law, and again, innocent civilians and children are being starved there, and we need that to come to an end.' Staff from Ireland's embassy in Tehran left the country on Friday as the embassy was closed, and updates are being provided on over 300 Irish peacekeepers stationed in Lebanon. Mr Harris said there were no plans to withdraw Irish troops and that 'decisions are being made constantly' to ensure their safety. When asked whether he supported Donald Trump's strikes on Iran, Mr Harris said: 'I think it's resulted in an extraordinarily dangerous escalation of a conflict that already best be described as a tinderbox. 'We're now entering a moment of particular danger, because I think the chances now of a spiral of escalation are more likely than ever before, and there is a real prospect now of the international community losing all control of this very, very volatile conflict.' He said there was only a 'very small' number of Irish citizens, many dual nationals, seeking an evacuation, and they were working with European counterparts. He said a significant update on this would be available in the hours ahead. 'Thank god we woke this morning to the International Atomic Energy Agency saying they haven't detected any increase in radiation,' he told RTE Radio. 'But imagine if we were waking up this morning to a situation where radiation levels were extraordinarily high, and the health and human danger that that would have presented far beyond Iran as well. So this is an extraordinarily dangerous time.' He said that it was 'sadly true' that international legal norms are not being adhered to, citing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israel's 'genocidal activity' in Palestine and now the Iran-Israel conflict. He said there was a diplomatic process in train and his understanding from readouts was 'there was a commitment from the Iranian side to further talks'. Mr Harris said Ireland and Europe are 'fully united in the clear view' that Iran should not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. 'The way to address this was always through a negotiated solution. Any alternative to that is simply too dangerous for civilians, for the Middle East region and for global security. 'Together with my EU counterparts, we will in the coming hours and days discuss and review the latest developments and consider the next steps Europe can usefully play to support de-escalation.' Minister for Culture Patrick O'Donovan said people woke up on Sunday 'terrified, really, to be quite honest, about the prospect of what's unfolding'. He told RTE's The Week In Politics it is 'terrifying' for citizens in Iran and Israel. 'It does take great people to make leaps of faith in particular places in time to come forward, whether it was in relation to (Anwar el-Sadat) in Egypt, and later on in relation to Bill Clinton and what he did, we do now require people to actually get people around the table,' he said. 'Because ultimately, as the Taoiseach said, this is terrifying, not only for the innocent communities that are living in both countries, but as well as that for the neighbouring countries in the Middle East, who we obviously all hope are not drawn into a much bigger conflict.'

Trump is terrified of Black culture. But not for the reasons you think
Trump is terrified of Black culture. But not for the reasons you think

The Guardian

timean hour ago

  • The Guardian

Trump is terrified of Black culture. But not for the reasons you think

By the time Jesse Owens bowed his head from the highest podium tier to be crowned with his fourth Olympic wreath in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Europe's premiers knew they had a problem. In front of a record-setting crowd at games that should have been a lavish display of Aryan propaganda, Owens's unmatched athleticism on the track humiliated the host Nazi regime and smashed one of the vital ideological pillars upon which European empires annexed the world into their racial order. Since the inception of race-based slavery and settler-colonialism in the 15th century, the novel idea that human beings could be stratified into distinct 'races,' with superiority defaulting to white Europeans, was bolstered by the claim that white racial supremacy was the rational outcome of the 'natural' biophysical, intellectual and aesthetic ascendancy of white people, and thus of whiteness itself. Adolf Hitler watched Owens, the five-time world record holder and grandson of enslaved people, triumph in his first event from a lavishly decorated imperial box, and abruptly exited the arena thereafter rather than witness Aryan athletes stumble to place second. In his conspicuous departure, a reluctant admission heard around the world had been made. A pillar was smashed. European physical superiority had been proven an undeniable fallacy and, more insultingly, Black dominance on the track was now a quantifiable fact. The ideological stakes of white supremacy – that whites were the smarter race, the sole ones capable of higher thought, that white people were the most physically beautiful, and also that the cultural products of whiteness were the most artistically valuable to advanced civilization – had suffered a powerful blow and shifted on its heels. In the 1930s, Hitler and his ministers embarked on a 'synchronization' campaign to bring fine arts, theatre, literature, architecture and media in line with Nazi propaganda – a move that was not unique to the Third Reich. All European colonizers expanded their empires via the theft and destruction of the cultures they subjugated, coupled with the intellectual propagandization of their own cultural superiority. Since the world wars, the march of modernity and the inescapability of western cultural imperialism continue to be hedged on that perfectly rigged game in which the products of whiteness are extolled as the most beautiful and significant because white intellectual arbiters tell us that they are. But in fewer than 40 years following the Berlin games, western empires were swiftly losing their hold on the cultures and minds under their rule. By the late 1960s, a Black freedom struggle in the US ignited a movement for African American identity, inspired by and linked to independence movements throughout the African continent and diaspora. The Black arts movement (BAM), a concerted effort to transform the artistic and cultural vanguard across Black politics, scholarship and organizations in the US, resulted in a creative explosion of cultural production centered on Black life and experience. BAM birthed a new Black consciousness – one sourced from self-determination and aimed squarely at thwarting claims of white cultural supremacy. It brought to the fore a generation of young Black writers, poets, artists, dancers and thespians who asked why any white-controlled institution was qualified to appraise art created for and by Black people. When Owens died in 1980 at just 66 years old, having spent his post-Olympiad life subjected to the repeated humiliations of Jim Crow, he and other 20th-century Black athletes had tapped the glass jaw in the myth white superiority and opened the floodgates for BAM's blitzkrieg against white cultural and intellectual hegemony. The movement was radically forged shifting away from conceding any white cultural supremacy, including a disinterest in white endorsement and patronage. BAM activists built their own institutions including bookstores, publishing houses, theatres, galleries, museums, cultural centers and scholarly journals and digests. Organizers started Black studies programs, conferences and curricula across the country. The movement understood that Black cultural production required Black intellectual production to secure its value and meaning. The ideological through-line from the overt white supremacy of the past to today is crystal clear. BAM's legacy can be found in the threat that Black culture and cultural institutions pose to new versions of old authoritarianism. In recent months, the Trump administration has advanced its culture wars to defund, demolish and demote the institutionalization of Black arts and culture, notably through very public takeovers of the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, and Smithsonian Institution, along with several high-profile firings of Black experts and leadership in these and many other institutions reliant on federal funding. With book bans and the seizing of administrative, fiscal and curricular control of elite universities, Donald Trump has declared open war on all knowledge and expression that his administration deems anti-white. Much of the public discourse has summed up Trump's demolition efforts as an assault on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) campaigns, and much of that discourse gets it wrong. In patronizing Black culture as merely worthy of representation in white spaces, we misconstrue the endgame of Trump's white supremacist politics. Trump knows that culture in the hands of subjugated peoples is a political weapon that he can't best. His lavish attempts at conjuring a culture via pageantry seem pathetic because they are. In a culture war fair fight, where Black people hold power in institutions, knowledge and politics, he will lose. Hitler wasn't affronted because Owens was included or represented in the games. The Führer stormed out infuriated after witnessing a Black man win. Even more important than its content, BAM's great victory was in putting forth an uncomfortable truth for the white mainstream: the cultural contributions of Black people laid bare the sheer fallacy of western cultural eminence. BAM was able to back up that claim with an organized Black scholarly and institutional thrust, thus exposing how claims of white cultural dominance were only buttressed by white political power. A look back at what BAM gained in turning Black cultural and scholarly institutions into wellsprings for Black political action explains why the Trump administration sees Black culture as an enemy. It also reveals what Americans got wrong by emphasizing the soft politics of representation and inclusion while shortchanging the capability of Black artistry to dethrone the great myth of white superiority. At the height of one of the most violent eras of the 20th century, BAM organizers set their sights on Black liberation, not conciliation. As a result, BAM's blueprint for Black power reoriented institutions and organizations and persists half a century later. Our stakes today are just as high, but in reducing Black culture into diversity and inclusion efforts we're playing directly into a game where Trump can expunge these politically inconsequential gains as soon as they are made. As the historian Gerald Horne has argued, African Americans have always been bilked of economic and political power in this country, but their cultural capital – particularly their visibility and influence – has long been outsized. For a demographic that consistently comprises only about 13% of the US population, Black entertainers, artists, musicians and athletes rank disproportionately among the most known and top performing figures in their fields. Black art forms such as the blues, jazz and hip-hop have done much of the heavy lifting of exporting 'Americanness' as a popular culture product around the world. By the late 1960s, in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X, an emerging generation of young Black artists, poets, writers, dancers and thespians began asking what they should be getting for that cultural influence, if that capital could be transformed into political action, and if the power of their cultural production could be harnessed exclusively on their terms. The Black arts movement was an artists' call to arms, born directly out of the ideological shift towards Black nationalism that was triumphed by Malcolm X. He insisted that Black people were a nation within a nation, and that Blackness was a cultural nationality unto itself. Its identity and aesthetic was oriented in the African diaspora, not in assimilation into white America. After Malcolm X's death, Larry Neal, a key theorist of the movement, wrote, 'the struggle for black self-determination had entered a more serious, more profound stage' that necessitated the formation of a Black cultural thrust, the building of autonomous Black institutions, and the need for a Black theory of social change. BAM activists saw themselves as the cultural branch of the larger Black power movement, where art would enable Black people to imagine themselves beyond the dictates of white racism, and graft the ideals that could envision a world in which Black people have collective control of their political and economic lives. In line with Malcolm's 1962 missive at a Los Angeles church, in which he asked Black people, 'who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to?', BAM forged a radical new expression of the Black aesthetic, one that both ignited sociocultural revolution and deposed the white gaze by recasting beauty itself as Blackness. 'Black is beautiful,' a refrain for the Black power generation, became more than a slogan that defined the time. It was a declaration of cultural independence and a battle cry in the fight for a sea change in Black identity. BAM converted Black cultural capital into Black political capital. Its key figures, who made up an extensive list of artists, activists and organizers – Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-Heron, Hoyt Fuller, Nathan Hare and Dudley Randall – understood that the politics of art was co-constituted with the art of politics. The movement swiftly enveloped better-known mainstream Black artists, including many who quietly funded causes such as the Black Panther party legal defense fund and several fledgling Black arts institutions. Artists such as John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Thelonious Monk and Harry Belafonte used their sounds, images and performances to amplify Black consciousness and liberation into the 1970s and beyond. BAM's artists radicalized a Black aesthetic into a political ideology and understood, as literary theorist Terry Eagleton explains, 'the aesthetic, one might argue, is […] the very paradigm of the ideological. Ideology and style are the same thing.' BAM was not a civil rights campaign, however, and its endgame was neither style and visibility nor representation and inclusion. What BAM artist-activists understood and made into a political strategy was the idea that art itself, as a product and form of Black expression, was not solely capable of liberating Black people. It needed to be safe-housed and incubated within Black communities by independent Black institutions. Thus even as BAM composed the cultural wing of Black power, it further deployed into subsidiaries across an institutional and scholarly landscape. BAM's organizational grid included numerous independent Black theatre companies, Black bookstores, independent Black K-12 schools, scholarly journals such as the Black Scholar, publishers including Third World Press, and digests such as Black World that became premier venues for the intellectual discourses that anchored Black art's political gravity and meanings. The art and cultural production of the movement offered a vision for revolution, but it was BAM's massive footprint across Black arts institutions and scholarship that converted that artistic vision to a currency of real social change for everyday Black communities, often accomplished by challenging the divide between 'fine' arts institutions and those serving the Black masses. Louis Chude-Sokei, the longtime editor of the Black Scholar, said how journal founders resisted the familiar elitism of academic scholarship. 'Their mission was to 'unite the academy and the street,' ... not just in terms of genre, language and style, but also in terms of the kind of people it affirmed as 'scholars' and 'intellectuals.'' In a survey by the Kerner Commission – Lyndon Johnson's national advisory board charged with investigating the underlying causes for Black urban social unrest and rebellion in the late 1960s – nearly 80% of Black respondents agreed with the statement 'all negroes should study African history and language.' Decades of toil, political gains and intensive planning and research by Black curators, historians and museum professionals resulted in the institutionalization of that survey into the world's largest museum complex. The Smithsonian's 19th installation, the massively popular National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), opened just more than a month before Trump's 2016 election. It enshrines Black material culture as history by jettisoning an often repeated myth about America, in which the nation's supposed exceptionalism is a result of harmonious multiculturalism, where various ethnic groups have voluntarily contributed to an 'American tapestry.' Instead, the 'Black Smithsonian,' as it has been nicknamed by loyal supporters, forges upon a road BAM paved and challenges one to question the US's whitewashed history. The result is a meticulously accurate inverting of the American narrative into one told through African descended experience, in which the US's economic, political and social systems were established for and by the purpose of using stolen land to exploit the labor of stolen people. This is not a Disneyfied tale of 'diversity' that gestures towards Black offerings into the melting pot mythos of a 'nation of immigrants'. NMAAHC's masterful curatorial team, under the helm of the Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G Bunch, stayed true to much of BAM's core legacy by exhibiting Black culture with a mind for raising Black consciousness. Visitors leave the museum not only with amazement and reverence for Black cultural preservation, resistance and perseverance, but also with reliable and verified information, which, studies have shown, the public trusts more when coming from museums than any other source. Bucking the propagandistic synchronicity campaign of the Trump realm, however, has brought NMAAHC directly into the administration's crosshairs. In recent months the NMAAHC has been a battle ground for Trump's authoritarian government, in which an executive order entitled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,' accuses the museum of advancing an 'improper' and 'divisive, race-centered' ideology by 'promoting', among many expert-backed facts, 'the view that race is not a biological reality' – the very biological pseudoscience that was once a pillar of Aryan propaganda and bolstered European imperialism's tenet of white biophysical superiority. The executive order was not an empty threat and targets other federally backed institutions such as the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery (NPG), which recently appointed a Black woman as the director of curatorial affairs and featured an exhibition on the Black Figure, and the National Park System's Independence national historical park, which the order accused of 'interrogating institutional racism' in its trainings. Just a week ago, Kim Sajet, NPG's director, stepped down after Trump's recent call for her termination. Trump's synchronization campaign has further rolled into takeover efforts for federally backed institutions not named in the order, such as the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Trump swiftly removed the center's longtime director, Deborah Rutter, and replaced board members with his loyalists, who soon after elected him chair. At the Kennedy Center's opening night on 11 June, Trump was met by jeers and expletives from longtime patrons, with shouts of 'rapist!' and 'felon!' while admirers shouted up 'we love you!' to his box seats. Terminations of the personnel of these institutions are just one part of Trump's far more entrenched war to defund and eradicate the institutional infrastructure of arts and culture, including recent drastic cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among many other public-private foundations. Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Kennedy Center's recently fired vice-president and social impact director, as well as a poet, dancer and playwright, publicly indicted Trump's efforts to 'take down everything Black'. Trump's messaging has consistently referred to this propaganda campaign for state control of culture as an 'anti-DEI effort' – euphemistic phrasing that has been adopted uncritically by many media outlets and the political left. Adopting the terminology is an acceptance of the propaganda itself, in which Americans miss the true political thrust of culture to incite social change. We omit the lessons we should all be carrying from the Black arts movement that taught us both our real target and how to use culture as our weapon against it. The soft-bellied politics of 'diversity,' 'inclusion' and 'representation' are not a challenge to the remaining pillars of white supremacy, but rather a concession to it. For example, there are many who argue that the US's elite 'fine' arts institutions have championed the cause to diversify and address their histories of exclusion with an explosion of post-2020 Black hires into their leadership. 'These hires are largely ornamental,' said Chaédria LaBouvier, the Guggenheim Museum's first Black curator and first Black author of its catalogue, 'as evidenced by the many layoffs, firings and eliminations of these positions since they were instituted.' BAM activists were insistent that Black cultural expression came with a political ideology and warned against attempts by powerful white patrons to defang Black art of its meanings for Black people. Even in BAM's day, 'diversity' efforts were deployed as tools to dismantle Black radical politics. The Kerner Commission, angst-ridden about the possibilities of continued Black protest, suggested that Black people be assimilated into capitalism as a means to quell the Black freedom struggle. Nixon took up the task with diversity programs for Black business owners who he hoped would subdue Black resistance organizing in American cities. BAM insisted that Black art must be canonized by Black intellectuals. While the fine arts world has witnessed recent record-setting auction prices for pieces by Black artists, LaBouvier notes that these works are generally treated as commodities, with appraisals subjected to the caprice of market fluctuation, whereas the value of works by many white artists are stabilized by the canonizing research of overwhelmingly white art historians. Diversity, inclusion and representation reinforce a belief that the cultural contributions of oppressed peoples hold value only in the grasp and domain of their oppressors. As Rafael Walker, an assistant professor at Baruch College who specialized in American and African American literature, noted, 'when you're talking about representation, presentation is in the word. You're talking about presenting to someone, to another. Present to whom? The Black arts movement did not give a damn about presenting Black culture for anyone else's approval.' In his efforts to demolish and disappear Black culture and the institutions that support it, Trump has made a loud admission: if he truly believed that Black culture were inferior, he would be leaving it on display and intact. Its mere existence would prove white supremacy. Trump knows the real threat of Black culture that has been shortchanged in the public DEI discourse, as his administration is a metaphor in itself for mythology of white supremacy: extensively kleptocratic, grossly inept and held in power by depraved and ruthless violence. As Haki Madhubuti, a BAM founding father, explains of the movement's endgame: 'The mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially tell our narrative, while at the same time move toward a level of success in this country and in the world? And we can do that. I know we can do that.' Trump's great fear is knowing we can, too. Spot illustrations by Tina Tona

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