In the 1970s, David Duke was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 80s, he was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives – and the kinds of ideas he stood for have not gone away

On 21 January 1989, the day after George HW Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for the 81st legislative district of the Louisiana house of representatives. Running as a Republican, he came out ahead of the state party’s preferred candidate, John Treen. Republican National Committee staff members went to Louisiana to bolster Treen’s faltering campaign and work against Duke. “We will do anything to defeat this man,” the Bush campaign manager and then RNC chief Lee Atwater declared to the Wall Street Journal.

The former and current Republican presidents endorsed Duke’s opponent and made advertisements on his behalf, to little avail: Duke would go on to win the runoff vote a month later and enter the state legislature. Over the next three years, Duke would aspire to higher and higher office. These subsequent campaigns, unsuccessful though they were, garnered Duke an ever-expanding platform for himself and his cause, bedevilled the establishment, and suggested deep structural failures in American society and its political system. But how did Duke, previously an abject failure in personal and political life, come to defy the direction of his chosen party and represent the crack-up of an old order?

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Fred C Trump III shares story of presidential nominee using N-word and describes Trump’s attitude on race

In a new book, Donald Trump’s nephew recalls the future US president, at the start of his New York real estate career, surveying damage to a beloved car and furiously using the N-word.

The shocking scene appears in All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C Trump III, which will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

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The England football manager was once derided as ‘woke’ and ‘soft’. But he has succeeded where his predecessors failed.

It’s just a game, right? Wrong. You don’t have to be on nodding terms with, let alone a fan of, the beautiful game to see that Sunday’s final of the European Championships – and the fact that England are in it – has a significance that goes beyond sport. It has implications for all the things that usually preoccupy us on these pages: politics, culture wars, race, masculinity, identity and our national story – and, unusually, most of those implications are good.

We can dispense swiftly with the most obvious. Keir Starmer likes to say his favourite Labour leader is Harold Wilson, the man who was in Downing Street the last (and only) time England’s men won a major international football tournament. Wilson milked that 1966 success the same way he capitalised on Beatlemania, and who could blame him? Success in Berlin on Sunday would give a feelgood boost to the country and be one more bit of luck for a new prime minister who, in recent weeks at least, seems to have been gifted with a crateload of magic lamps and a full squad of genies.

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England has moved on from nostalgic pretensions of greatness to a patriotism rooted in equality and self-expression

Nationalism does not make nations. But it helps to invent them. Nowhere is this more true than in football. When England kicks off this Sunday against Spain in the final of Euro 2024, a victory would mark the end of 58 years of men’s footballing heartbreak in major tournaments. But it would also signify the triumph of a new country and legitimise the radical positions taken by an England team distinguished by youth and talent that their critics rarely display. The nation’s identity is inextricably tied up in the sport: England’s semi-final win was the most-watched programme this year.

The hinge around which this history turns was the last men’s Euro tournament, when before every match the England team “ took the knee ” as an expression of solidarity with anti-racist protests and was booed by a section of the fans. Rightwing newspapers and politicians stepped in to criticise the players. When England ended up losing in the final to Italy, three black players who missed penalties faced a torrent of racist abuse. Fast forward to 2024. When England lost to Iceland in a warm-up game, Bukayo Saka – who was only on the pitch for 25 minutes – appeared in some newspapers as responsible for England’s defeat with headlines like “ Black ice ”.

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The Sound of Metal star plays a character based on writer and director Yann Demange, who travels to Paris to reconnect with his Arab roots

Sometimes the smallest projects are the most interesting. That may well be the case for Riz Ahmed ’s newest film: a 16-minute short called Dammi, directed by Yann Demange, of Top Boy and ’71 renown, which is receiving an unusually high-profile release on the streaming platform Mubi .

Partly it is because Ahmed is now a bona fide Hollywood figure after films such as Sound of Metal , Nimona and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – having cut his teeth in indie British cinema, with credits including Shifty , Four Lions and Trishna . But Ahmed is also something of a overachiever with short films; along with director Aneil Karia, he won an Oscar for The Long Goodbye , a hard-hitting short about a British Asian family brutalised by neo-Nazi paramilitaries, and inspired by his own album of the same name.

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Noël Coward theatre, London
Kit Harington and Olivia Washington star in a charged, often comical drama about the legacy of historical racial violence in three couples’ sexual dynamics

What happens in the bedroom, with all the power play between couples, is vital documentation in literature, said Doris Lessing in defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It might be an old argument but it is an effective one in favour of Jeremy O Harris’s confrontation with race between the sheets.

The overarching idea behind his play is that historical racial violence lives on, somatically, through the generations and reveals itself in sexual dynamics. Its enactment is in its own outre league: rarely has a West End stage seen a giant black dildo employed on a Gone With the Wind-style four-poster bed, along with antebellum master-slave cosplay and a tongue-frenzy of sexualised boot licking.

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We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2021: After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine – as well as their own. By Simukai Chigudu

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Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam plays a lightly fictionalised version of himself in David Schickele’s restored 1971 film reflecting on race and nationality

Here is a unique document: a 1971 work by US musician and film-maker David Schickele, long neglected but now restored and reissued. It is a vividly beautiful and dynamic monochrome work resembling something by Godard or Cassavetes but with something special and specific; an amazing real-time transcription of the life of a young black man in San Francisco in the fraught year of 1968.

The focus is Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, a young Nigerian nonprofessional actor playing a lightly fictionalised version of himself called Gabriel: enrolled in college in San Francisco, hanging out, having romantic relationships with black and white women, trying to earn money. Scenes from Garbriel’s life are interleaved with an interview he is apparently giving to an off-camera questioner, speaking with warmth and articulate charm about his experiences back at home and in the US, and how as an African national he is considered an exotic outsider in the US, and almost exempt from the racism dished out to black Americans, who seem white to him. All a terrible irony, considering what is to take place.

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Sarah Crew says some Avon and Somerset officers were hurt by her decision but it helped improve trust in community

A chief constable has said her acknowledgment that her police force was “institutionally racist” unsettled and hurt some officers but insisted it has allowed the force to make vital changes.

Sarah Crew, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset, described her declaration a year ago as a “step towards” communities who believed the police never listened to them, and she said it had helped the force deal better with a series of high-profile killings in the past 12 months.

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