Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor issued multiple vile attacks against President Donald Trump in her May 20 commencement speech at Hampshire College, a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Taylor accused Trump of being a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.”
“It’s not a benign observation, but has meant tragic consequences for many people in our country—from terror-inducing raids in the communities of undocumented immigrants to his disparaging of refugees in search of freedom and respite,” Taylor also said during her speech.
One of the more interesting parts of the speech occurred when Taylor, perhaps without realizing it, suggested that the federal court decisions striking down Trump’s executive orders temporarily restricting immigration from several Muslim-majority nations were the result of political activism, not the application of the law.
“When Trump’s first illegal Muslim travel ban was attempted, thousands of ordinary people flooded the airports around this country,” Taylor said. “And because of those protests, and the defiance they represented, that ban was stopped—not once, but twice. It is not enough just to be outraged. Injustice has to actually be defied.”
Taylor also said Trump “empowered an attorney general who embraces and promulgates policies that have already proven to have had a devastating impact on black families and communities,” but it’s not clear what she was referring to specifically.
In 2016, Hampshire College made national headlines when the school lowered its American flag to half-staff in honor of the violence occurring in the wake of Trump’s November election. The flag was then burned the day before Veterans Day. The flag was later removed so that “racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviors” could be examined, according to college President Jonathan Lash.
After outrage over the college’s decision to remove the flag reached a fever pitch, the school returned the flag to its rightful place in December.
As you might expect an Associate Professor of race baiting:
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
- ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
- Department of African American Studies
- PH.D, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
- Northwestern University
- OFFICE:
- 001 Stanhope Hall
- OFFICE PHONE:
- (609) 258-4613
- EMAIL:
- kytaylor@princeton.edu
- TWITTER:
- @KeeangaYamahtta
On Sabbatical from the Department of African American Studies for the 2016-2017 Academic Year
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), an examination of the history and politics of Black America and the development of the social movement Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States. Taylor has received the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book.
Taylor’s research examines race and public policy including American housing policies. Dr. Taylor is currently working on a manuscript titled Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s, which looks at the federal government's promotion of single-family homeownership in Black communities after the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taylor looks at how the federal government's turn to market-based solutions in its low-income housing programs in the 1970s impacted Black neighborhoods, Black women on welfare, and emergent discourses on the urban “underclass”. Taylor is interested in the role of private sector forces, typically hidden in public policy making and execution, in the “urban crisis” of the 1970s.
Taylor’s research has been supported, in part, by a multiyear Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, the Ford Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Taylor was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013-2014. Taylor received her Ph.D from the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University in 2013.
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