Trump's Ban on Iran's Soccer Team Revives An Ugly Historical Truth

From Jesse Owens to the 2026 World Cup. From George Stinney to Cyrus Carmack-Belton. From Jim Crow to Pete Hegseth. History isn’t repeating itself—it never stopped.

This week is Juneteenth. Every year we are reminded of the same uncomfortable truth: freedom announced is not freedom delivered.

June 19, 1865—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free. The delay was not an accident. It was a choice. Power does not surrender what it can still hold. And the history of Black (and brown) people in America is, at its core, the history of power finding new ways to hold what it insists it has already released.

The mistake too many make is believing that history is behind us and that chapter is closed. Instead, it is alive—in our courts, governments, sports arenas, military, and carceral system. And I want to take a moment to share just three examples, three undeniable examples of how America’s history of racism is thriving today—and what we must do to counter these injustices. Let’s Address This.

Jesse Owens and the 2026 World Cup: 90 Years of the Same Contempt

In 1936, Jesse Owens traveled to Berlin and humiliated Adolf Hitler’s theory of Aryan supremacy on the world’s most visible athletic stage. He won four gold medals. He did it with grace, with power, and with a dignity that the Nazi regime could not touch.

He came home to America. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to allow him—or the 17 other Black United States Olympians—into the White House. They were forced to celebrate their historic achievements elsewhere. Not because they had done anything wrong. Because the President of the United States could not bring himself to honor Black excellence in his own house.

Ninety years later, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is being hosted on American soil. And President Donald Trump is banning the 26-man Iranian national team to stay in the United States, forcing them instead across the border in Mexico.

And then there is Omar Artan—named Africa’s best male referee in 2025—who arrived in Miami to officiate at the World Cup and was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He was denied entry. A U.S. official claimed Artan had “association with suspected members of terror organizations.” No evidence was provided. No due process was offered. He was sent home.

Omar Artan is Somali. And Somalia is one of nearly 40 countries whose citizens are currently banned from entering the United States under Trump’s immigration crackdown. Let us look at that list honestly: Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Countries under partial restrictions include Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

I want you to look at that list and find the white-majority countries.

Take your time. I’ll wait.

Given Trump’s documented, years-long campaign of dehumanization against Somali Americans, his repeated targeting of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and his propaganda about the Somali community in Minnesota—the idea that Omar Artan’s denial is about security rather than race requires a willful suspension of disbelief that I am not willing to perform.

Ninety years separates the 1936 Olympics from the 2026 World Cup. But the vile contempt for melanin is identical. The only thing that has changed is the vocabulary used to dress it up.

George Stinney and Cyrus Carmack-Belton: 82 Years of the Same Verdict

On June 16, 1944, the state of South Carolina executed George Stinney Jr. by electric chair.

George was 14 years old.

He was convicted of murder by an all-white, all-male jury. He had no legal representation. There was no evidence against him. The jury deliberated for ten minutes before returning a guilty verdict. His parents were denied the right to see him as he sat alone in a prison cell for 81 days—81 days of terror, isolation, and mental anguish that is genuinely unfathomable for a child who had done nothing wrong.

He was executed at 7:30 PM. The electric chair was too large for his body. He had to sit on a Bible to reach the electrodes.

It was not until 2014—seventy years later—that George Stinney’s conviction was posthumously overturned. Not one person who participated in his murder—not the accusers, not the prosecutors, not the police, not the judge, not a single member of that jury—was ever held accountable. Not one. George Stinney Jr. might still be alive today.

Now it is 2026. A South Carolina jury has just found store owner Chikei Rick Chow not guilty of murder in the killing of Cyrus Carmack-Belton. Cyrus was a 14-year-old Black boy whom Chow shot in the back while chasing him from his convenience store in Columbia.

Shot in the back. Running away. Fourteen years old.

His murderer — Not guilty.

I think of Trayvon Martin, who was walking home. I think of Tamir Rice, who was playing in a park. I think of Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging. I think of Aiyana Jones, who was sleeping. I think of Sandra Bland, who was pulled over. I think of Breonna Taylor, who was in her own home.

The verdict in each of these cases—whether delivered by a jury or by the state’s decision not to charge anyone at all—has been the same: the life of a Black person is not worth the consequences of taking it.

Have we advanced as a country? The question answers itself. And when politicians work to revive the infrastructure of Jim Crow—gutting voting rights, defunding civil rights enforcement, stripping DEI protections, banning the history that explains how we got here—we must understand what they are building toward. They are not nostalgic. They are strategic. And we must not allow this fascism to continue to advance.

Erasing the Record: The Strategy of Forgetting

There is a reason the Trump regime is gutting everything related to Black and brown history. It is not carelessness. It is not bureaucratic efficiency. It is strategy.

You cannot easily repeat atrocities that people remember clearly. So you erase the memory first. Which is what the Pentagon is doing as we speak. Multiple outlets report that the website for Arlington National Cemetery quietly “unpublished” links to lists of notable graves, walking tours, and educational material pertaining to Black veterans, Hispanic veterans, women veterans, and some Medal of Honor recipients. The people who bled and died for this country have had their stories removed from the digital record—not by mistake, but by deliberate policy choice.

Likewise, the Guardian reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stripped nine Navy officers—including women and Black service members—from a promotion list, resulting in an all-male, overwhelmingly white slate of 22 nominees advancing to become one-star admirals. This did not happen by accident. It required active intervention to remove qualified officers and replace them with a list that looks like it was assembled in 1955.

Let us be precise about what this administration is doing. These are the political heirs of the people who:

Enslaved Black people, then banned them from schools, from the military GI Bill, from FHA loans, and from any meaningful reparations for the theft of their labor, their bodies, and their futures.

Lynched Black Americans with impunity—and who are now kidnapping Latino Americans into concentration camps with the same impunity.

Locked Japanese Americans into internment camps and banned Asian immigration entirely.

Broke every single treaty made with Native American nations while committing what historians and legal scholars recognize as genocide against Indigenous peoples.

And who are now gutting the laws designed to counter that harm—and passing new laws to ban the teaching of that history in our schools.

These are the people who say, with a straight face: “Stop making everything about race.”

The erasure of history is not a side effect of their agenda. It is the agenda. Because if you do not know what was done, you cannot recognize when it is being done again. And if you cannot recognize it, you cannot resist it. Which leads to my final point of why this systemic racism persists in the United States.

The Failure of Government and Legacy Media

Here is what should outrage us as much as the injustices themselves: the near-total absence of sustained accountability from the institutions designed to prevent exactly this.

Government has failed. Not a single person was held accountable for the murder of George Stinney. Not a single officer faced consequences for the killings of Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, or Aiyana Jones. The machinery of the state—the courts, the prosecutors, the juries—has been deployed not to deliver justice, but to ratify impunity. And the Trump administration is not a rupture from that pattern. It is its logical culmination—the same machinery of racial exclusion, now operating with executive authority and ideological conviction.

Legacy media has failed. The erasure of Black and brown veterans from the Arlington Cemetery website received a fraction of the coverage it deserved. Omar Artan’s denial of entry—Africa’s best referee, barred from a World Cup held on American soil—was treated as a footnote in immigration coverage rather than the civil rights story it is. The exoneration of Chow in the killing of Cyrus Carmack-Belton was covered as a local crime story rather than what it is: the latest entry in a decades-long pattern of Black death going unanswered in American courtrooms.

Corporate media is too invested in access, too beholden to the same billionaire interests that benefit from racial hierarchy, and too addicted to the performance of neutrality to name these patterns with the clarity they demand. And so the patterns continue—reported on individually, never connected, never indicted as a system.

That is the work of independent media. That is the work of Let’s Address This. And that is why your support of this platform is not just a subscription—it is a commitment to the kind of accountability journalism that the moment demands.

What Juneteenth Demands of Us

Juneteenth is not a celebration of freedom achieved. It is a reminder of freedom deferred—and a demand that we refuse to defer it any longer.

Jesse Owens deserved to walk into the White House. George Stinney deserved to walk out of that prison. Cyrus Carmack-Belton deserved to walk home. Omar Artan deserved to walk off that plane in Miami and do his job.

But they were denied those rights not by fate, not by circumstance, not by the neutral operation of law and policy—but by the deliberate choices of people with power who decided their lives mattered less. Meaningful accountability means naming those choices. It means demanding consequences for them. It means electing people who will fight to change the systems that produce them—and removing from power the people who are actively working to restore them.

The past is not past. But the future is also not inevitable. History is repeating itself because we have allowed the people who benefit from repetition to remain in power. The answer to repetition is resistance—organized, sustained, uncompromising, and loud. That is what Juneteenth demands. Not a day off. Not a barbecue. A reckoning.

And a commitment that this time, freedom will not wait another 81 days—or another 70 years—to be delivered. Subscribe below and stay tuned for my follow up piece on Juneteenth where I share my favorite Black writers, activists, and scholars, and what each of us can do to support and elevate their work and advocacy.

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Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This—a platform dedicated to human rights, historical accountability, and the journalism that corporate media refuses to deliver. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.