As soon as Donald Trump was elected President, the tacit comparisons to 1930s Germany began. Many people quoted—via memes—the famous line by Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor who spoke out against Adolf Hitler and who paid for it by spending the last seven years of his life in a concentration camp.
While some of those doomsday scenarios may have represented a more cynical point of view, it does not seem so far-fetched today. “Give him a chance”, people said, “He is our President.” However, events as they have unfolded since Trump’s ascension to power have not given anyone solace in the face of such historically laden circumstances. To anyone with even the most basic appreciation for history, the parallels to the 1930s are obvious and unsettling.
Today, the Ku Klux Klan expresses itself openly—not only with words, but with violence. Black lives are terrorized daily; bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers have reached record levels; and calls to reinstitute “Stop & Frisk” are being reissued. Should it matter that today it’s called ICE and not Gestapo? Like in those troubling times, people of conscience have begun to organize to protect others from being rounded up. Today, we do have something called a “resistance.”
The historical echoes are chilling. And without going into all the parallels (there are many) “Professor Watchlists” for so-called “anti-American” scholars have drawn increased attention thanks to the so-called “alt-right” and White supremacist blogs and news services which cause them to go viral. Left-leaning or progressive academics (especially scholars of color) have been picketed by College Republican conservative groups. Most recently, Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor at Princeton University, received death threats after Fox News aired a clip of her commencement speech at Hampshire College. Taylor canceled scheduled public talks as a result. A petition initiated by the Princeton University Department of African-American Studies and a Facebook post by #BlackLivesMatter in solidarity with Taylor went viral.
But unlike the alleged rebukes of conservative speakers, such as last year’s flap over the authors of the controversial book The Bell Curve, and the expected hue and cry about abuses of academic freedom from the right, Yamahtta Taylor’s case did not garner as many headlines as it probably should have.
Besides these egregious examples of individual harassment, there has also been what might be called “institutional harassment.” In these cases, either college presidents of color—Black leaders of predominately white institutions, or in a recent case, presidents of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In a “post-civil rights” society, the question before these leaders is how to lead Black institutions of higher education in the Trump era—dealing with a government that is hostile to Black people.
In a time where people loudly question the need for HBCUs —and see it as an example of reverse racism—why do we have historically Black institutions? Why is there a Black history month? We don’t have a White history month? The rise of White student unions on college campuses tells the tale. What is the role for HBCUs in a time of #BlackLivesMatter? How do we get a seat at the table?
