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civil rights movement
Why the Rest of the World Should Boycott Trump’s America
Trump is effectively boycotting the world by withdrawing from international institutions and violating international norms. The world should return the favor.
Mar 24, 2025
The Trump administration objected so strenuously to a recent speech by South Africa’s ambassador that it expelled him from the United States.
What did Ebrahim Rasool say that was so objectionable? Honestly, the speech he made at a webinar sponsored by a South African research institute was rather boring.
But embedded in his remarks is this observation: “Donald Trump is launching… an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home.”
Don’t come here, don’t invest here, don’t buy from Tesla or Amazon or any of the other corporations that have kissed Trump’s ring.
This sentence requires a bit of interpretation. The “incumbency” in this case is the federal bureaucracy; the diversity, equity, and Inclusion programs in government and business; anti-racism initiatives more generally; and even elements of the Republican Party that haven’t been Trumpified. “Supremacism,” meanwhile, is white supremacy.
Essentially, the ambassador was pointing out that Trump and MAGA have launched a campaign to advance white supremacy in a country where the civil rights movement achieved enough progress to qualify today as the mainstream.
This isn’t a wild accusation. Among all the racist actions of the current administration, perhaps the most outrageous is Trump’s promise to expedite American citizenship for white Afrikaaners from South Africa that, Trump insists, are experiencing discrimination.
So, while the administration is deporting Black and Brown people by the thousands and trying to claw back birthright citizenship from even more people of color, it is offering to fast-track citizenship for a bunch of white people from Africa. This is not an Onion headline. It’s white nationalism. Even if Afrikaaners were experiencing discrimination in South Africa—which they’re not—privileging their entrance into the United States over Afghans terrified of returning to Taliban rule, Haitians escaping social collapse, or Sudanese fleeing civil war would still count as racist.
Trump’s overtures to the Afrikaaners are also a startling reversion of U.S. policy to the apartheid-friendly positions of the 1980s, when the Reagan administration bucked world opinion by maintaining strong relations with the white minority regime in South Africa. At that time, the anti-apartheid movement in that country was calling on the world to boycott, sanction, and divest from (BDS) South Africa.
Now that a white nationalist has (again) become president of the United States, it’s time to take inspiration from the anti-apartheid movement. As the Trump administration imposes restrictions on travel from 43 countries to the United States, as it slaps tariffs against allies and adversaries alike, as it cozies up to autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as it dismantles federal programs designed to help people in need all over the world, as it withdraws from the Paris climate accord and the United Nations Human Rights Council, as it illegally deports thousands of people and sends some of them to horrific prisons in El Salvador, as it voices support for far-right, neo-Nazi political parties, as it threatens to seize Greenland and absorb Canada, it’s time to call on the world to treat this country as a pariah.
András Schiff has just done that. The great pianist announced this week that he has cancelled upcoming engagements and will not perform in the United States. This comes after he has refused to play in Russia and his native Hungary as well. “Maybe it’s a drop in the ocean; I’m not expecting many musicians to follow,” Schiff said. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s for my own conscience. In history, one has to react or not to react.”
Such a boycott should not be a permanent shunning but a specific response to policies that are in clear violation of international law and universal values of democracy and human rights. Yes, the United States has been in violation of such principles in the past. But this time, the Trump administration has crossed so many lines that it threatens to overthrow the very system of international law.
Once the U.S. government abandons its policies of white nationalism, among other unacceptable positions, it can be welcomed back into the community of nations. Until then: Don’t come here, don’t invest here, don’t buy from Tesla or Amazon or any of the other corporations that have kissed Trump’s ring. Trump is effectively boycotting the world by withdrawing from international institutions and violating international norms. The world should return the favor.
Isolating the Trump Administration
The Trump administration’s indiscriminate tariffs have already prompted a number of countries to respond in kind. Canada has imposed $32.8 billion in tariffs against the United States, while Europe has imposed $28 billion worth. China announced a “15% tariff on U.S. coal and liquefied natural gas, along with a 10% tariff on other products, including crude oil, agricultural machinery, and pickup trucks.”
The residents of these regions are also adjusting their travel plans accordingly, a move that Robert Reich recently endorsed. The Washington Post reports:
Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead. International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5% this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9% increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
Trump’s policies are hurting the United States, from the travel industry and research institutes losing federal grants to the average consumer who is paying for all the tariffs through higher prices.
Some observers recommend that other countries resist the temptation to shoot themselves in the feet by imposing penalties of their own. Economist Dani Rodrik, for instance, suggests that retaliatory tariffs will only hurt the countries imposing them, so the best strategy “is to minimize the damage by staying as far from the bully as you can and waiting for him to punch himself out and crumple in a corner.”
Another option, economist Gabriel Zucman urges, is to apply tariffs to U.S. oligarchs: “If Tesla wants to sell cars in Canada and Mexico then Musk himself, as main shareholder of Tesla, should have to pay tax in Canada and Mexico. Put a wealth tax on him, and condition Tesla’s market access to him paying the tax.”
Changing travel plans, slapping tariffs on U.S. goods, taxing U.S. plutocrats: These are all potentially useful strategies. But they don’t go far enough.
Hit the Hornets’ Nest
You’ve heard this advice before: Don’t antagonize him, don’t make him lash out, don’t further endanger those around him. But abusive husbands only continue their unacceptable behavior in the face of such coddling.
Many international leaders hope that they can avoid Trump’s wrath by praising him, treating him to military parades when he visits, or at least laying low in the hopes that he won’t direct his wrath in their direction.
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for instance, has done his best to curry favor with Trump, particularly after the disastrous White House meeting last month. In this way, he was able to restart U.S. military aid and intelligence-sharing. But he’s still on the verge of being sold out at the bargaining table if and when the Trump administration accepts Russia’s hardline terms for a cease-fire and peace deal.
The alliance against fascism worked in World War II. The anti-apartheid movement was successful. Let us now stand against the Trumps and Putins and Netanyahus of the world.
Still, you might object, no country is powerful enough to put Trump in his place. And those that might have a shot at doing so—China, Russia—are more interested in working with Trump to divide the world into spheres of influences.
But that still leaves a lot of countries that can band together, like an army of small and mid-sized Lilliputians to tie down the power-drunk Gulliver. They simply have to hit the United States where it hurts. Don’t buy products from American companies that support Trump. Don’t allow those businesses to invest in your countries. Reorient your currency transactions away from the dollar.
These measures should not come all at once. Rather, they should be staged strategically to force Trump to back down from his most noxious policies. Name-and-shame tactics don’t work with leaders who have no shame. Grab him by the wallet—it’s the only language he understands.
Will such measures hurt ordinary Americans? Probably. But no more than Trump is already hurting us. The tariffs that countries have imposed in retaliation against Trump’s actions will adversely affect nearly 8 million U.S. workers, the majority in counties that voted for him. But these costs are nothing compared to what the world will suffer as a result of Trump’s cuts in foreign assistance, which will likely kill hundreds of thousands of people a year.
One last recommendation: Don’t cut off all communication with the United States.
In the 1980s, the anti-apartheid campaign fostered considerable contact between the United States and South Africa. But it was a relationship based on solidarity between civil society organizations. My dear friends in Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America: Please do not equate Trump with the United States. Yes, a lot of people here voted for him. But they are starting to have buyer’s remorse. Let’s join hands across borders and party lines and say, “We will not tolerate racist bullies.”
The alliance against fascism worked in World War II. The anti-apartheid movement was successful. Let us now stand against the Trumps and Putins and Netanyahus of the world. They are the 1%, and they are vastly outnumbered.
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Remembering Rev. Nelson Johnson and the Historical Record
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths.
Mar 02, 2025
On Saturday, February 22, one of America’s great civil rights and labor activists was laid to rest in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s possible you haven’t heard of Reverend Nelson Johnson, though Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the dynamic founder of Repairers of the Breach, the “co-anchor” of the new Poor People’s Campaign, and professor of the practice of public theology and public policy, places him (and his wife Joyce Johnson) in the rank of “Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Mother Jones and Martin Luther King Jr.” It’s salient in this moment, too, that the social, racial, and economic rifts that sparked the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and claimed the lives of five of Reverend Johnson’s fellow activists—scarring him for life—continue to divide our country today.
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths. Given this, it’s imperative to correct the historical errors and omissions in a recent New York Times obituary for Reverend Johnson.
The obituary reports that when, just prior to the November 3, 1979 murders, a caravan of Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis arrived at the start of a march Nelson Johnson and his fellow communists were mounting against racism, the police were “standing nearby.” This isn’t true. The police were, by official order, absent and out of sight and therefore unable to stop the approaching violence. What makes this particularly alarming is that at least three law enforcement agencies—the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms—had elicited enough information from informants and infiltrators to stop the white supremacist attack before it happened. Every serious investigation of the November 3, 1979 events over the last quarter century acknowledges this.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
Klansmen and Nazis inflicting violence on African Americans, Jews, Catholics, Latinos, Native Americans and left activists is a horrific though unsurprising fact of American history. However, we must not omit from this history the responsibility of the public officials charged with protecting and serving all our citizens. The very foundation of our democratic system rests on the implicit and explicit trust we place in state officials and institutions to protect us in situations like the one that led to the Greensboro Massacre.
The Greensboro Massacre reminds us, as we are being reminded again today, that the only way to preserve that trust is to hold officials accountable when they betray it and commit crimes. Sadly, our justice system did not find the vigilante white supremacists or complicit officers of the law criminally responsible for the November 3, 1979 murders. Only a federal civil suit brought a sliver of justice to the tragedy. The New York Times obituary notes the civil judgement that found eight defendants liable for death but does not tell readers who they were: Five were Klansmen and Nazis, one was a police informant (and former FBI informant), and two were Greensboro police officers. This judgement reminds us that we must continuously resist the influence of reactionary white supremacist politics in our law enforcement agencies and justice system.
The obituary concludes with the installation of the 2015 North Carolina state historical marker commemorating the massacre. Left unreported, however, is the tenacious and hopeful work, not only by Reverend Johnson, but by Greensboro’s civil society, to set their history right. Thanks to these groundbreaking efforts, which included a two-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the City of Greensboro offered two apologies for the massacre: one in 2017, following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and another in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This second apology explicitly acknowledged that the Greensboro Police Department could have prevented the violence on November 3, 1979. Movingly, the city established a scholarship fund in the names of the five slain activists.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
It’s also important to remember, however, that Reverend Johnson’s historical significance is far greater than the trauma of November 3, 1979. His 60 years of racial and economic justice activism may be seen as an essential bridge, spanning from the revolutionary visions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Dr. William Barber’s current mobilizations on behalf of our nation’s poor. Like both these leaders, Johnson saw race and economics as inextricably linked. And like them, he never stopped trying to fix the root causes of inequality in America for all people suffering predatory capitalism. He came to consider demonizing others, even one’s enemies, as a mistake. That revelation would lead him away from communism to liberation theology and the idea of revolutionary, Christian love. This philosophical shift, however, didn’t transform Johnson from radical to reformer; he never stopped believing that true equality and justice in the United States will only come with fundamental changes to our values, our institutions, and our economy.
Reverend Johnson’s community-based work has inspired labor and racial justice leaders all around the country. Though his name might not, until now, have been known widely, his work with unions and churches and social justice organizations has been buttressing grassroots democracy for decades.
The life of this big-hearted farm kid from the Airlie, North Carolina expands the geography, timeline, and scope of the conventional civil rights story. Getting his story right broadens our understanding of American history’s lessons, affirms a powerful faith in equal justice and democracy, embraces the power of community, and rejects the repression of our country’s truths.
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We Must Resist Trump’s Attack on DEI
Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.
Jan 25, 2025
This year, the presidential inauguration took place on the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. President Donald Trump fully exploited the opportunity, hijacking King’s memory to advance his agenda. In his inaugural address, Trump took immediate aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. The bigotry embedded in Trump’s plans to “Make America Great Again” is stark—purging people of color and LGBTQIA people, not only from employment in the federal government, but from public life. But people have fought for too long, and too many have died, in the fight for equality.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” refers to a system of policies and practices that promote fair treatment, full participation, and full access to employment and opportunities for all, especially for people from historically marginalized communities. Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.
“Today is Martin Luther King Day,” Trump said in his inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda, one of the only factually accurate statements he made. He went on, “In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”
Moments later, though, he pledged,
“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
Following the speech, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. Within hours, a form letter was emailed to federal departments, ordering the suspension, by end of day Wednesday, of any staff working on DEI initiatives, and giving remaining staff 10 days to report any ongoing “disguised” DEI activity, ie, to rat out colleagues.
While Trump spoke at his inauguration, a different gathering was taking place just a few blocks from the White House. Hundreds packed into the historic Metropolitan AME Church, the storied Black church that abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended, and where his funeral took place. In 2005, after Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol, her casket was moved to Metropolitan AME, for a memorial service.
Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton was speaking at the same moment as Trump. Hearing that Trump had invoked King’s name in his speech, Sharpton responded:
Donald Trump just said that he is going to end DEI this week, he’s gonna put out his executive orders. You have all these corporations that are saying they’re gonna back off DEI. Why do we have DEI? We have DEI because you denied us diversity, you denied us equity, you denied us inclusion. DEI was a remedy to the racial institutional bigotry practiced in academia and in these corporations. Now you want to put us back in the back of the bus? We’re going to do the Dr. King/Rosa Parks on you. We will call you out one by one, and we will shut you down.
Later on King Day, Trump held a rally where he signed the first stack of executive orders, including a blanket rescission of many of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including at least 15 that advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion. Later, Trump signed a much broader order calling for the termination of all “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government,” and to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.”
The “A” in DEIA stands for “accessible,” thus extending Trump’s war on fellow citizens to include the disabled.
Sharpton and other speakers invoked not only Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but the whole sweep of history, from the first arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, to Frederick Douglass, to the role of freed slaves fighting in the Civil War, through the protests in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, convened an emergency “Demand Diversity” roundtable in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. While Trump was inaugurated on King Day, Morial pointed out that Trump is no king:
These executive orders are unlawful, they are unconstitutional, and they seek to do what we always suspected. This is not a monarchy. You can’t rule by decree or edict. This is a constitutional democracy… we have to remember this as we go into this very important battle.
Participants in the roundtable, representing over 20 national civil rights and human rights organizations, form the core of a coalition committed to fighting Trump’s agenda. The coalition is guided and inspired by the memory and the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. Organize, boycott, resist. These are the struggles, ultimately, that history will remember as great.
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