Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto let Donald Trump walk all over him on Wednesday, Enrique Krauze writes. From a Mexican perspective, it was painful to watch the little-liked president conduct himself courteously and rationally with a visitor who would then go home to use the encounter for his own racist purposes. “Peña Nieto should have demanded a public apology for Trump’s insults against Mexico and Mexicans,” Krauze argues. And he should have “publicly expressed his absolute refusal to pay for Trump’s absurd wall.”
On Saturday, Trump plans to visit a black church, and the New York Times has published excerpts from a leaked script his advisers prepared for the candidate to use at the appearance. The script, “sedate and milquetoast” for something prepared for Trump, shows just how emphatically the candidate is aiming his message on race at like-minded white people, Jamelle Bouie writes. In its emphasis on an ideology of colorblindness, the script completely fails to “speak to the worries and anxieties held by millions of black Americans, which are intimately tied to race.”
In the wake of Georgetown University’s announcement that it will accord preferential admissions status to descendants of slaves held—and sold—by the institution in the past, Matthew J. Cressler argues that white Catholics, accustomed to thinking of themselves as historical underdogs, need to realize their own role in the history of American slavery. “We white Catholics have hoped to hold onto an American identity untainted by the sins of racial injustice,” Cressler writes. “What is missing from this story is the cost of our transformation” from outcasts to insiders—“ ‘the price of the ticket,’ to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin.”
As Congress comes back into session and considers what to do about Zika, Cameron Nutt writes that understudied outbreaks of the disease in West Africa deserve increased attention. “The hope that the strains of Zika found in Africa might not cause microcephaly now seems quite unlikely,” Nutt argues.
For fun: The New Yorker published a comically bad Gene Wilder commemoration cartoon, and we couldn’t stop picking at it.
It appears the long weekend has arrived,
Rebecca
