And why, today, President Trump would cancel my project

The Course

In the fall of 2021, I was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Timișoara, Romania. I retired in 2018 after almost four decades teaching Political Science to American college students.

My academic specialty was American politics. Being selected for the Fulbright Scholar Program in retirement allowed me to ask myself this question:

What stories about America would give Romanians the most comprehensive picture of America’s struggle to live up to its Founding ideals?

The answer came to me in the spring of 2021 when my partner Rebecca and I were touring the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

I asked our guide, a young African-American man, why he worked at this outdoor museum honoring the 4400 black Americans lynched by other Americans.

He replied:

Because they tried to eradicate us.

This young man gave me the answer to my question.

To understand America, my Romanian students and I needed to read, hear, and see the voices of my fellow countrymen who had been on the receiving end of this kind of hatred.

A hatred I had never experienced. So I created a course with the voices of black artists, intellectuals, politicians, activists, and scholars.

I titled the course The Black Freedom Movement and American Democracy.

On the first day of class, I shared with my students the PowerPoint in the photo above and told them we would:

Read, listen, and watch the work of Black Americans

Langston Hughes, Nina Simone, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen (Artists)

James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass (Intellectuals)

President Barack Obama (politician)

Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcom X (activists)

Isabelle Wilkerson, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Richard Johnson, Thomas Holt, Vincent Harding, Ta-Nehisi Coates (scholars)

One student raised her hand and asked:

Why Black Voices?

Why not American Indian voices?

Linda had lived in America and had worked with Native Americans.

I said a good way to learn about a country is to see it from the edge, from people who were not included as full citizens. In America, that list is long and does include Native Americans, women, Latinos, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and the LGBTQ community.

I chose Black Americans because of the centrality of the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow to the development of American society.

And because of the centrality of the Black Freedom Movement to the development of American Democracy.

And because many liberation movements in America and around the world learned lessons from America’s Civil Rights Movement.

Including Romanians, in 1989.

I then asked the class:

Why is voice important in a Democracy?

My Romanian students were doing a Master’s Degree in American Studies.

Many were elementary or secondary school teachers; most worked full-time. We met once a week, for 90 minutes. Each student took 6 or 7 courses each semester in this two-year graduate program. All spoke excellent English.

Their parents were part of the first generation that had experienced democracy after almost 50 years of ruinous Communist rule. They were busy, mature, curious, and opinionated.

So I waited for an answer.

Alexandru said

My voice is important because my interests are different from yours.

Bingo. I clicked to the second slide with this quote by Jennifer Richeson, a Yale Psychologist.

My lab is in an old engineering building and there’s exactly one women’s bathroom. No one noticed. And then slowly, Yale began adding women to the department, and they noticed it. They complained. Now there was friction. What had gone unnoticed by those in power in one era was unacceptable to those gaining power in another. When new people show up, they notice things and begin making demands.

Canceling Voices

Below is a photo of the American Fulbright scholars in Romania during the fall of 2021. Rebecca and I are in the left front row, in blue and black coats, briefly without masks, as this was still COVID time. We are standing in front of the Palace of Parliament, the second-largest building in the world, after the American Pentagon.

In June of this year, the New York Times reported that the entire Fulbright Board resigned because President Trump’s State Department, which runs the program, cancelled 200 scholarship grants already awarded through a lengthy vetting process, because they were on topics contrary to the positions of President Trump. (source)

Subjects included global warming, gender, ethnicity, and race.

Yesterday, in a social media post about America’s Smithsonian Museums, the President said

The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’ “ Trump said in his post. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been. (source)

In my Black Freedom course, I included President Obama’s speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches. It’s a beautiful blend of two ideas, in tension. How far America has come on race and how far it has to go. Both are essential stories. The voices of Black Americans are necessary to explore the gap between American ideals and the reality of its practices.

When I think about the love I have as an adult for my late parents, a mature love, it is built upon everything I know, including their imperfections. As a kid, I idealized them, an immature, incomplete love. Now, I’m not afraid to see them whole.

The same is true for how I evaluate my progress as a human being. The sanitized version does me no good.

President Trump wants only the sanitized version of America.

He’s not the first to try to shut down voices; it’s an old American story, as my Romanian students would tell you.

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