Profs blame Trump win on working class racism, 'spiritual depravity'
The University of Maryland is hosting a series of post-election lectures on how a “commitment to white supremacy” fueled the Trump train, blaming “white America’s spiritual depravity” for his unexpected victory.
One talk scheduled for the February 13 “Understanding Race and Class in the 2016 Election” event, set to be delivered by Professor Paula Ioanide from Ithaca College, will apparently discuss the “spiritual degradation of white America in the age of Trump,” during which Ioanide will elaborate on the “spiritual depravity, deadening, and social alienation” of America’s working class.
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“I argue that these collective symptoms are fundamentally rooted in white Americans’ investments in gendered racism, which teaches whites not only to deaden themselves to the suffering of others but to their own humanity,” her abstract for the lecture notes, suggesting that “white America will either reckon with and remedy its collective spiritual degradation, or the chickens will come home to roost.”
Another lecture set to headline the event—titled “Make America White Again? The Racial Reasoning of American Nationalism”—will break down Americans’ rationale for voting Trump into four “pillars” of “racial reasoning.”
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“The pillars of that ‘racial reasoning’ are: (1) beliefs in nonwhite dysfunction and pathology; (2) a white patriotism that loves ‘America’ and hates ‘the state;’ (3) a sense of whiteness as Messianic paternalism; and (4) a palpable commitment to the nation that whiteness is under attack,” an abstract for the lecture explains.
University of Connecticut Professor Matthew Hughey, who will deliver the lecture, concludes his preview by reducing all Trump voters’ motivations down to “white supremacy,” arguing that Trump’s victory was “neither coincidence nor fluke accident, but a natural and purposeful consequence of a social, political, and economic commitment to white supremacy.”
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The February event will be co-sponsored by the school’s “Critical Race Initiative,” which claims to examine “the ways that race permeates social institutions to maintain systemic forms of inequality,” as well as the UMD law school.
Campus Reform reached out to both Ioanide and Hughey for elaboration on their lectures, but neither responded in time for publication.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski
