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Top Biden administration officials have begun rewriting their ironclad support of Israel throughout the end of President Joe Biden’s term, now claiming to oppose Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza as it’s officially tipped into famine — a famine that they fully laid the groundwork for over the first 16 months of the genocide. In an…

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has decried those using the tragedy “as an opportunity to villainize our trans community.”

In The Progressive, I’ve documented the importance of teaching Black history, whether it involves learning about the origins of our nation, Juneteenth, the Reconstruction era, or the history that informs critical race theory. A result of the discomfort that can come from learning history and experiences that run counter to popular American mythology is backlash, and there has been backlash: the crescendo being an Executive Order meant to restore “truth and sanity to American history.”

The discomfort is due in part to the belief that Black history is for Black people, that it is an exaggeration of Black victimization at the hands of the world’s first modern democracy as well as an embellishment of Black achievement. Therefore, Black history is for Black people only. However, educator and author Brian Jones disagrees in his new book, Black History Is for Everyone.

Black History Is for Everyone

By Brian Jones

Haymarket Books, 208 pages

Publication date: September 30, 2025

For Jones, learning Black history allows us to actually be a more perfect union. “Black history is for everyone precisely because it is not about promoting a new kind of superiority,” Jones writes. “Instead, by seeing the past in a new way, Black history offers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves (whether you identify as Black or not) in a new way, too.”

Jones’s story of learning is like mine and like that of most students who learn U.S. history in American schools, where they are “fed superiority-infused stories of race, of nation, stories of heroic revolution in 1776, and ever-expanding rights and freedoms.” But history isn’t cute and convenient; stories are. Stories often leave out the details. History is meant to reveal a full picture.

Jones’s text seeks to correct the fables of history classes nationwide by encouraging teachers to embrace a history they have little understanding of—a history that, no matter how tough it may be to swallow, is entirely digestible.

Jones begins making his case by sharing a story of a childhood friend who is white and declares his skin color to be peach while Jones’s is brown, in order to explore the matter of racial consciousness. Reading this made me reflect on the first time I became conscious of being Black. It’s an experience that most, if not all, Black people experience—even characters like Carlton Banks.

Imagine navigating such an introduction absent a nuanced understanding and explanation that race is not biological but social, and having to learn this lesson through interactions over the course of growing up—interactions shaped by laws, court precedent, and racial pseudoscience. It’s a lot. Now imagine an educator who can help children navigate those waters within a learning environment where it is safe to question, answer, and explore. It’s a lot easier to understand for all students, regardless of age.

Jones continues introducing how a nation is forged amid race classifications, and what this has meant for Black people who have experienced violence at the hands of what Black studies scholar and author Charisse Burden-Stelly rightly calls “the U.S. capitalist-racist state” in the form of surveillance, disruption, and murder. Jones doesn’t shy away from the hypocrisy of a nation founded on the freedom to keep African people in bondage. Nor does he shy away from the comparison of the revolution of settler colonialists to that of enslaved people in Haiti and the meaning of the nation-state.

Jones explains that understanding race and nation are central to understanding our collective identities, which help us make sense of revolution, “when everyday life and relationships are transformed, and what seemed impossible suddenly becomes possible.” That’s the power of Black history; it is instructive for moments that call for revolution, such as the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc., which allowed the Trump Administration to proceed with Executive Order 14160, a challenge to birthright citizenship, but I digress.

In fewer than 160 pages, Jones undertakes a most crucial endeavor of our time: spreading the gospel of why Black history is for all of us to learn. Black history is about Black people demanding, following the Civil War, that education be free and accessible to all, and that people have access to education everywhere, taught by anyone. Jones builds on that history here, advocating for the teaching of Black history to all.

The question is, are we wise enough to learn Black history or doomed to a cycle of insanity for failing to learn from it?

Award-winning journalist Mario Guevara, who had begun documenting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, has been detained since his arrest at a protest on June 14 in DeKalb County, Georgia. Guevara has spent almost all of his detention in ICE custody, although he is authorized to live and work in the United States. He immigrated…

The ACLU on Thursday condemned President Donald Trump’s administration for refusing to participate in a United Nations mechanism “that calls for each UN member state to undergo a peer review of its human rights records.” The president’s decision to ditch the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) follows a February executive order withdrawing from various world bodies,…

In a small hospital ward in Gaza City, six-year-old Mohammed Salah Qasem lies motionless in bed, his frail frame wrapped in a thin blanket. At a severely reduced body weight, he is fighting a battle for survival on two fronts: a rare genetic illness and the forced starvation gripping the people of Gaza.

Mohammed was born with mitochondrial disease, a rare inherited condition that attacks the body’s nervous system and muscles. Before the war, diligent medical care kept him stable; he could sit upright, attend regular physiotherapy sessions, and manage his symptoms with six or seven daily medications. His diet was rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, and meat, which provided nutrients that helped him maintain his strength. But all of that changed when the war began in October 2023.

After being displaced from Ard al-Shanti in northwest Gaza to the Sheikh Radwan area of Gaza City earlier this year, Mohammed’s family suddenly found themselves cut off from access to the medicines and food that their son depended on. Even before the conflict, his father, Sallahdine Qasem, had to order some of his less widely accessible medications from Egypt. Now, with Gaza’s borders sealed and supplies scarce, they are impossible to find.  

Without treatment, Mohammed’s condition has deteriorated rapidly. “He hasn’t taken his nerve medicine in over a year,” Sallahdine explains. “At night, the seizures don’t stop. He can’t sleep, and neither can we.” What’s more, the  oats and vegetables central to his restricted diet have vanished from the markets, and his body rejects the limited food options available to them. Bread—the cheapest option—worsens his digestive problems. “He throws up everything he eats,” his father says.

Even if Mohammed’s family could regain access to his medication, finding doctors who can provide him with essential medical care would remain a struggle, as the number of operational health facilities continues to dwindle. Amid sieges, violent conflict, and evacuation, seventeen of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals have been forced to suspend medical care. Even the operational hospitals are suffering, with 94 percent of hospitals on the Gaza Strip facing damage or destruction due to targeted attacks by Israeli forces.    

In al-Rantisi Hospital, the children’s hospital in Gaza City where Mohammed and his parents have stayed since late June, there were no beds or medication available, including pain relief drugs and first aid kits. For days, Mohammed and his mother slept on the floor. The boy is weak and increasingly withdrawn, unable to engage with other people except members of his family. His father says his hair is beginning to fall out—a symptom of severe malnutrition. Mohammed’s battle against malnutrition is far from unusual: According to the United Nations, more than 100 children have died in Gaza due to malnutrition or hunger since October 2023, and nearly one in five children under the age of five in Gaza City is acutely malnourished.  

Less than a year ago, Mohammed’s family had reason for hope. In October 2024, he received approval from the Gaza Health Ministry in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO) to receive treatment abroad. The following month, WHO contacted the family, requesting his medical documents and promising to arrange his transfer to a hospital abroad equipped to treat his condition. But the family stopped hearing from WHO months ago.

“I contacted them again and again,” Sallahdine says. “Even the [WHO] doctors who saw him [before the war began] have stopped replying. I feel helpless.”

Mohammed, who by now would have completed at least two years of primary education if not for the war, has never been to school. At an age when he should be learning to read and write, he lies in a hospital bed, unable to sit upright, often crying in pain.

His father’s plea is simple and urgent: “Mohammed needs to be treated abroad as soon as possible. If not, we are going to lose him.”

For now, the family waits, trapped in a war zone, watching their son fade while the world looks away.

Back in early June, as U.S. Senators began debating the contents of President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, noticed a last-minute provision that opened up a sulfide mining project in northeastern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). 

After pressure from Smith and concerns about Senate parliamentary procedures, Republicans dropped the provision. But the Trump Administration’s aim to introduce mining in the area has brought renewed attention to the Boundary Waters, with Smith noting after the passage’s removal from the bill that “the fight is far from over.” 

The Boundary Waters, which is more than one million square acres and stretches across much of northern Minnesota, is known for its roughly 1,100 lakes, which attract roughly 250,000 people a year for canoeing, camping, and backpacking. The fight to protect the Boundary Waters has unfolded over decades, but its recent history dates back to 2011, when Twin Metals Minnesota began a study on the possibility of mining at the edge of the Boundary Waters. This move caused the development of Save the Boundary Waters, which was formed in the face of growing pressure to open up the protected area for mining projects. Alongside this organization, Indigenous communities, including the Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, and White Earth bands of the Minnesota Chippewa requested the ban of sulfide-ore copper mining on federal public lands in 2016; in 2020 all six bands of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe voiced similar support. 

Smith and other public officials in Minnesota, including Democratic Representative Betty McCollum, have long advocated for protecting the Boundary Waters. Smith introduced federal legislation in April that would permanently protect the wilderness area from sulfide mining. 

But Smith’s fight against mining efforts has been nearly nonstop—and each political win seems to be short-lived. With the support of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in June that the administration would be overturning the “disastrous policies of the Biden Administration” that banned mining in the Boundary Waters. In July, Deputy Secretary of the Interior Kate MacGregor reinstated a legal opinion from Trump’s first term that allows developers to renew mineral leases in northern Minnesota. 

Since the end of the nineteenth century, northern Minnesota’s Iron Range has made mining an ongoing subject of debate. Companies are still actively mining for iron ore at several locations in the region, but other locations have closed over the years due to decreasing demand for certain natural resources. Such closures intensify calls from many mine workers and community members to build new mines in the range that can create jobs while extracting copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, gold, cobalt, and now sulfide. Since the discovery of copper in the Iron Range in 1948, environmentalists have cautioned against possible air and water pollution from mining; environmental advocates say the economic benefits don’t override the long-term tradeoffs. 

Now, decades later, renewed efforts by the Trump Administration to open up the region to mining constitute a dire threat to the local environment, but they also present a profit-seeking opportunity for Antofagasta PLC, a Chilean mining company that, in 2015, bought Twin Metals Minnesota, which is currently seeking federal approval to create a copper sulfide mine near the Boundary Waters. The company has been known to work with, and benefit from, authoritarian leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, a military dictator who was the president of Chile from 1973 until 1990. In similar fashion, Antofagasta PLC has built both a personal and professional relationship with the Trump Administration, even renting out a $5.5 million dollar mansion to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term. 

While Trump and his allies cozy up to multinational corporations, activists are resisting these extractive political alliances. Honor the Earth, an organization with a history of support for Indigenous-led resistance in Minnesota, is also focused on challenging mining projects around the world that harm Indigenous peoples. 

“Our stance on extractivism is that it should be kept in the ground. There should be no mining because all mining harms the earth. Specifically, mining is horrible for the water,” says Ashley LaMont, the organization’s co-director of sovereignty and self-determination. In northern Minnesota, she says, rice beds in and near the Boundary Waters watershed provide an essential first food for Indigenous communities, and lakes are critical to the region’s ecosystem. “We know that the harm that is caused from the mines . . . does cause damage to manoomin—wild rice—that is important to the Ojibwe people and that this is, in turn, harmful to the community, [Indigenous] lifeways, and future generations.” 

Save the Boundary Waters, the nonprofit funded by Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness (NMW), is currently at the forefront of lobbying and legislative efforts in the fight against mining in the region. Given the environmental threats that mining in the region would exacerbate, the organization has forged relationships with state and federal legislators to ensure the protection of the Boundary Waters remains a key issue for lawmakers. These relationships have given politicians like Smith the support she needs from her constituents to take the first step by introducing legislation to protect the area, as well as companion legislation introduced by Minnesota State Representative Alex Falconer to protect nearby state lands within the Boundary Waters watershed. 

Because the BWCA is a federally designated wilderness area, it is more likely to find long term protection through federal legislation, according to Libby London, communications director for Save the Boundary Waters. However, London says a number of other paths of advocacy, including political battles at the state level, are also necessary avenues for a permanent solution.  

“There’s something called a permit to mine,” London says. “The state must also approve several major permits before a project could move forward, including a permit to mine and air and water quality permits. That stays in place regardless of what the Trump Administration does. So that’s a backstop.” Although Save the Boundary Waters is focused on working with Congress and pursuing lawsuits at the state and federal level, London explains, backstops might just be necessary given the threat of the Trump Administration. 

In a press release after the removal of the mining provision from the Big, Beautiful Bill, Ingrid Lyons, the organization’s executive director, wrote, “Make no mistake: The threats in Washington to our public lands are far from over. People across the country who love our public lands must stay united and vigilant—now is the time to stand up for America’s wild places.”

But the fight to save the Boundary Waters also carries implications outside U.S. borders. Because the international community has experience resisting authoritarian governments and multinational corporations such as Antofagasta PLC, they may be able to share tactics and methods that have succeeded historically. Honor the Earth has recently expanded its focus to issues of transnational importance, like extractive mining. 

“We must see beyond borders,” LaMont says. “We might think we are above and beyond the rest of the globe, but we are an incredibly interconnected [people]. Especially when we’re talking about the climate, there is no way that you can evade or combat climate chaos if you aren’t actually taking measures with . . . people across borders. These fights that we have here on Turtle Island have ramifications elsewhere.” 

A proposed sulfide mining project back in Minnesota wouldn’t just impact the immediate area—it would hurt Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park, sovereign tribal nations, and communities living around the Great Lakes. In the event that legislation and litigation fails to protect the Boundary Waters, London says, Canada could provide transnational support in the form of international law.

“The International Joint Commission has expressed concerns about copper mining in the watershed and First Nations communities in Canada have also expressed concerns,” London explains. As part of their work, members of Save the Boundary Waters traveled to Canada in 2019 to meet with the Grand Council Treaty #3, which consists of twenty-eight First Nation communities, to discuss concerns about how copper mining impacts ancestral homelands. 

For Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes region, water has long been the site of political struggle. The Stop Line 3 movement—which began in 2014 when Indigenous community members raised concerns about a proposed pipeline replacement project in northern Minnesota—was built on the idea that lakes, rivers, and wild rice beds, all of which are resources assured by treaties with the federal government, needed to be protected. 

Tara Houska, a tribal attorney, enrolled citizen of Couchiching First Nation on Rainy Lake, and founder of the Giniw Collective, was heavily engaged in the movement to Stop Line 3, and has recently joined the fight to protect the Boundary Waters. “These are the waters, islands, and shores we have netted, riced, paddled, and stewarded for countless generations,” Houska says. “The trees carry our prayers, the islands know our dreams, the lake and rivers hold our songs. Our cultures are interwoven with these lands and waters.” 

With the threat of Trump and his multinational allies on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters, legislation and lobbying remain essential. But, Houska notes, invoking treaty rights might be the move that protects this region once and for all. “In speaking with . . . First Nations members,” Houska says, “we all know sulfide mining cannot be done safely and it absolutely should not be in this water-rich, rare, pristine region.” 

Should mining near the Boundary Waters cause pollution, London says, the United States would be in violation of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. The 116-year-old treaty between the United States and Canada is a legally binding document that recognizes that each country is affected by the other’s actions with regard to lakes and rivers on the international border, giving the two countries a framework to handle disputes under the International Joint Commission. 

Indigenous communities in the United States, LaMont says, need to recognize their position in relation to global Indigenous peoples, many of whom have experienced mining operations of critical minerals in their own communities for quite some time. For Indigenous communities in northern Chile, for example, water has become a key reason for resistance to mining projects. In the Antofagasta region in the northern part of the country, where mining accounts for 68 percent of total water usage, Antofagasta PLC’s Los Pelambres mine has been fined for water pollution. The company caused what the Chilean Archaeological Society called “the biggest loss of heritage in recent history” when it excavated an archaeological site to make way for a new mining project. 

The current anti-mining struggle in Chile has roots in the 1973 military coup that resulted in Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, during which the nationalization of copper mining was reversed, giving Antofagasta PLC free reign to mine in the country that’s the world’s largest producer of copper. Although Chile returned to democracy in 1990, its mining policies have remained largely unchanged since the Pinochet regime, resulting in significant bouts of pushback toward Antofagasta PLC, other companies, and the Chilean government in the form of neighborhood protests and labor strikes. 

Throughout the Americas, Indigenous communities have often led the fight against these kinds of extractive practices. “Extractivism causes the same problems over and over again,” LaMont says. “Once you’re displacing and removing Indigenous people from the lands that they belong to, it is harmful to the ecosystem.”

The effort to save the Boundary Waters is far from over, but Indigenous peoples across the world serve as examples of how to resist multinational corporations and their authoritarian partners. Political battles and litigation clearly have their place, but at the heart of this fight is community solidarity, from Canada to Chile. The hope, LaMont says, is that these alliances, however unlikely, might take back some power from repressive leaders and their multinational allies—and save the Boundary Waters in the process. 

“All movements have a lot to learn from each other,” LaMont says. “Environmental movements have a lot to learn from Indigenous people in particular, but as Indigenous people we have a lot to learn from how Palestinians organize, how our Black relatives organize, and how they’ve successfully moved their movements forward.”

Independent journalist Jordan Flaherty was in New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina first hit, and both supported and reported on relief efforts in the aftermath of the storm. Flaherty explains how Katrina’s devastation to the city’s infrastructure accelerated the existing dispossession of its primarily Black residents, how corruption and mismanagement in the years following…