The overwrought hyperbole by college students rocks on in the nascent Trump presidency, this time via a piece by University of Oklahoma students Taylor Sanchez and Rachel Hurtado.
Titled “Now is time for direct action against white supremacy, continued violence of US,” the authors contend that those now living in “occupied territory known as the United States” should learn from the lessons of the Reconstruction Era Populist Party and then-newly-freed slaves.
The Populists, they write, “utiliz[ed] class analysis to formulate an alliance between poor whites and newly freed slaves against white elites.” However, the elite “were able to create racial divisions in the alliance and gain the support of working-class whites through false promises to alleviate white poverty and segregation laws.”
See the connection? The current “elite” = the Trump administration and the GOP Congress.
From the Oklahoma Daily op-ed:
The election of Donald Trump was a disruption to the narrative of colorblindness that developed during the presidency of Barack Obama in the post-Civil Rights era, but the implications of Trump’s election are even greater.
Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” appealed to those who felt their social status was under attack. Recent executive decisions by Trump prove that he does not take his campaign slogan lightly. In light of calls for justice for extra-judicial murders of black and native peoples, Trump has committed himself to getting “tough on crime” and supporting law enforcement. He ignores calls against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines while granting easement of the projects, and he denies climate change in order to refuse switches to alternate forms of energy. He has planned a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that would resettle native lands in the Southwest, such as that of the Tohono O’odham nation, and materialize the xenophobic fantasy of blocking immigration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations have already occurred throughout the nation. Trump ordered a travel ban against predominately Muslim nations, maintaining America for Americans — which we can understand as coded language for white, if you are Donald Trump.
What we are witnessing is another iteration of the long trajectory of manifest destiny, the attempt to perfect the settlement and rid America of its racial others through its appeal to white subjects.
Hey wait — President Obama developed a “narrative of colorblindness”? Hardly. Such a notion is completely anathema to modern racial progressives.
And, as you might expect, Sanchez (a film and media studies major) and Hurtado (social work) invoke the critical race theory concept of free speech in response to those who advocate using First Amendment rights to engage in dissent: “This invokes a temporal relationship to violence that renders invisible the discursive criticisms that various people of color have produced since the beginning of conquest.”
Or, to put it another way, “Under an administration that denies the intensity of anthropogenic warming given a scientific consensus, one cannot be reasonably expected to discursively negotiate their way through violence.”
Got all that?
MORE: Critical race theory and free speech limits based on feelings
MORE: Student op-ed: If you criticize violent protests you endorse hate speech
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