Welcome to Pushback. I'm Erin Mate. A white police officer's killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis

has sparked nationwide protests for justice. Attacks by officers on protesters across the country

have only amplified outrage over systemic racism and police brutality.

Combined with the economic and social impact of the ongoing coronavirus crisis,

it is a time of anger and despair.

And meanwhile, amidst the suffering and repression at home,

the U.S. government, in bipartisan fashion, continues to attempt to impose its will on countries abroad from Venezuela to China.

Well, to discuss, I spoke earlier with Dr. Gerald Horn, Morris Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, author of more than three dozen books, including his latest, which

comes out in July, The Donning of the Apocalypse.

Dr. Horn, welcome to pushback.

Let me start by asking you your response to the unprecedented, in recent years at least,

protests that we're seeing across the country following the police killing of George Floyd?

Well, first of all, to state the obvious, it obviously represents a kind of collective snapping

on the part of the black community and its allies. That is to say that what was unremarkable

about the murder on tape of George Floyd was precisely

how unremarkable it was, how we become somewhat desensitized in light of Eric Garner being

slain in Staten Island in 2014 and Philando Castile in Minnesota just a few years ago.

But there's a deeper question that I'm afraid to say that even some of our friends on the left have not been able to explore. That is to say that one of the reasons why it's repetitively black men who are being killed is that it ties directly into the history, the bloodstained history of this country.

That is to say that when the colonies were bolted against London at 1776, one of the motor forces, as I said in my book, the counter-revolution of 1776, was this idea that London was moving towards abolition

of slavery, which would jeopardize the fortunes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James

Madison, and the lawyer for slave owners, John Adams. Rather than see that eventually, they

rebel. Africans, by several orders of magnitude, oppose the formation of the United States of America,

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