There is a wonderful and welcome irony to the fact that the Trump administration is working to sideline or silence the history of racial struggle in the United States while the new American pope is raising the profile of that struggle in a very unexpected way.

It’s remarkable enough that Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, is the first pope from the United States, and the second to spend much of his career in Latin America. But the real revelation is that this man from Chicago has roots in Creole Louisiana, specifically the Seventh Ward neighborhood of New Orleans.

“Creole,” which originally referred to French and Spanish-descended people who lived in the territory before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, has long referred to an ethnic and racial gumbo of people with Bl

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