A liberal arts school in Kentucky is hosting an event entitled “White Citizenship as Terrorism: Make America Great Again, Again,” on March 17 via Zoom.
The Young America’s Foundation obtained a flyer for the upcoming event at Berea College. The flyer tells students that the presentation “offers to resituate Trumpism and white citizenship as forms of white terrorism enacted against the majority of people living within the borders of the U.S. and beyond.”
The event is centered around the idea that white people who voted for President Donald Trump wish to return to the 1950s in hopes of recentering white racial dominance.
“Despite calls for multiculturalism and color-blindness, segments of white America mourn their so-called loss of privilege, consistently begging to return to the nostalgic past of their esteemed value as white citizens went unquestioned,” the flyer reads.
The event description proceeded to call “Trumpism” a form of “terrorism.”
“If terrorism is defined as the use of violence and threats to create a state of fear towards particular communities and identities, then this is what ‘Trumpism’ is at its core,” the flyer reads.
Co-sponsoring the event is the “Women’s and Gender Non-Conforming Center” and the Law, Ethics, & Society organization.
The Zoom event will feature University of New Mexico professor Amy Brandzel. Brandzel is the author of “Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative,” which argues that there is “nothing redeemable about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of ‘community,’ practice, or belonging.”
The University of New Mexico has a history of promoting events and teachers that push “anti-Trump” ideology. According to Campus Reform, University of New Mexico faculty members hosted a series of events in 2017 that included a discussion called “Understanding ‘Trumpism’ through Racism and Whiteness.” At the lecture, one professor played a video defining “Trumpism” as the “stockpiling of wealth and power” through whiteness, capitalism, and ethnocentrism.
Professors on college campuses across the nation have taken to social media, particularly Twitter, to express their disdain for what they called “Trumpism.” A University of Pennsylvania professor once said that Republicans are “evil” and “craven.” She also called “Trumpism” a “virus.”
Schools have gone so far as to offer college courses that specifically explore “Trumpism” in a negative light. According to Campus Reform, in 2018, Columbia University offered a course to education students on “Trumpism” and the “connections between wealth, violence, and politics.”
According to an email from Columbia University, the course was titled “Education in the Age of Trump” and introduced the “past and present conditions that allowed Trump to seize electoral control of a major American political party and acknowledges the intersectional nature of power and politics.”
Such courses and events have drawn from the work of historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, both of whom seek to study “Trump’s rise as a product of the American lineage of racism, sexism, nativism, and imperialism.”