CAMRY DEAN
Staff Writer
As part of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, Fredonia welcomed Eileen Boris of the University of California, Santa Barbara last week.
As Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, Boris presented her talk, “Trump’s America in Historical Perspective: The Assault on African Americans, Mexicans and Muslims, the War Against Women, and the Battle Against Unions” on March 29.
“Whether you supported or opposed Donald Trump in the 2016 election, I think that we can all agree that he was not your typical candidate, he’s not your typical politician and he has not been your typical president,” said Jennifer Hildebrand, Ethnic Studies program coordinator and ALL IN committee member. “And yet, as students in my classes are probably sick of hearing me say, ‘nothing happens in a vacuum.’
“I have been hearing the word ‘unprecedented’ a lot, especially from pundits lately and I certainly agree that March 2017 has looked significantly different than March 2016 or March 2015, but since I am trained as a historian, I have to balk at the word ‘unprecedented’,” she added.
The talk looked at the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump so far from a historical point of view and laid out that these attacks on minorities and women have not been isolated incidents in American history.
“[Boris] is in the perfect position to help all of us contextualize the recent election through multiple lenses that consider race and ethnicity, gender identity and class, while also framing her analysis within a deep, historical context,” Hildebrand said.
While Boris presented on topics such as immigration and women’s rights, she spent a majority of her time on racism and the assault on African Americans. As she began, Boris described the historical connotations of the core of Trump’s campaign and presidency: his slogan.
“Certainly, we could argue that Trump fed into a certain kind of white masculinity,” Boris said as she described Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” She also spoke on Trump’s inauguration speech and how he declared “America First.”
“America First was an isolationist group from 1940,” said Boris. “America First became the America First Political Party in 1943, which became the Christian Nationalist Crusade by 1947.”
According to Boris, both the America First Party and the Christian Nationalist Crusade were founded by Gerald K. Smith and the Christian Nationalist Crusade was an anti-Semitic organization.
“In his using this phrase, ‘America First,’ Trump not only reverberated to isolationism but was echoing organizations that had ended up having a tinge of anti-Semitism, or pro-Nazism and [pro-]white Christianity,” Boris said. “Did he do this deliberately? We don’t know. But as a historian, I know that words count.”
Trump is no stranger to allegations of racism, being sued by the Justice Department in 1973 for racial discrimination. During his campaign, he also called the Black Lives Matter movement a disgrace, was in favor of Stop and Frisk and implied multiple times that black people only live in inner-cities. Although she touched on these examples, Boris spoke about the racist history of voter fraud.
Despite having no proof, then President-elect Trump tweeted on Nov. 27, 2016, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
“The charge of voting fraud has been used when too many people of color show up at the polls,” Boris said. “His charge of voting fraud ironically took place as we’ve [recently] seen a weakening of the Voting Rights Act.”
Before the Voting Rights Act, African American men were almost completely disenfranchised and although the 15th Amendment gave all men the right to vote, states found loopholes to continue to prevent black men from voting.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forbade racial discrimination in voting and in 2013, the U.S. saw two provisions to the act struck down by the Supreme Court case of Shelby County v. Holder, which again allowed states to use methods to purposely keep African Americans from voting.
“[The case] struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act which said that states that had practiced discrimination and had been found by the Attorney General had the preclearance to change their voting laws. And that was struck down,” Boris said.
As a result, Republican-governed states such as Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Mississippi were able to adopt stricter voter ID policies and end same-day registration and early voting. States like Ohio, Kansas and Wisconsin got rid of polling places in certain areas.
“Trump’s charge of voter fraud takes place with the suppression of votes,” Boris said.
Boris even went as far as to discuss the Constitution of the United States and the history of the Electoral College.
“The Constitution was a slave-document,” she said. “With the Three-Fifths Compromise, slavery was built into the fabric, racism was built into the fabric [of America].”
According to Boris, because of the Three-Fifths Compromise, in states where slavery was still legal, they were given more representation in the House of Representatives and that power is still held by Republican states today.
“Donald Trump is a politician like none, or is he?” Boris said. “Are his signature positions an aberration in the long-sweep of U.S. history? That’s what I want you to think about.”