Come to Wellesley College to hear Dr. Yohuru Williams dissect and eviscerate the Trump administration’s attack on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Such policies are meant to broaden opportunity. They take us closer to our professed goals of liberty and justice for all. Yet the Trump administration wants to abolish them. Civil rights protections have already been reversed, so that any effort to help students of color is treated as a violation of this administration’s hostility to DEI.
Yohuru Williams is a leading scholar and public intellectual who has often appeared on public television to expound on African American history. He is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a wonderful speaker.
Join me on October 6 at Wellesley College.
Open to all. Free.
Yohuru Williams is speaking as part of the annual lecture series that I established several years ago.
The event will be live-streamed and available later online.
When I was much younger, I thought that people had come a long way and that the pace of improvement in our species was accelerating–that we were getting smarter and kinder and more knowledgeable and–the sum of these–wiser.
But here we are in the age of Trump, when people can’t even agree that we should make any attempt to curb significant existential risks to ourselves and other life on this planet. When American democracy is a memory. When the country is run by a profoundly predatory and selfish billionaire boys’ club. An age in which power is held by heedless morons with reliable support from a mass of blithering idiots and a small group of ultra-wealthy, ultra-venal predatory billionaires who consider Trump their useful idiot and Trump’s toadies their private collection of action figures and bobblehead dolls. These billionaires simply do not care about the deluge that comes after them. It’s good to be them. They can have anything they want, any time they want it. Here we are, the rest of us, living in the Oligarchical Idiocracy.
Is there any hope for us?
I am beginning to doubt this. We are just too freaking stupid.
I imagine a great debate in a hall somewhere on the question of whether humanity has a future. The yes side presents its evidence over several days’ time. The no side simply says, “Trump.”
QED.
Any situation so dire that it is possible for the likes of Trump to attain and hold power simply doesn’t seem survivable.
How bad does it have to be for Trump to be possible?
Really, really, really egregiously, ineluctably irredeemably, irrecoverably bad.
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A friend (who served four years in the Marines followed by nine years in Army Special Forces) observed that in every country his teams operated in (he once shared, when no one could have been watching or listening, that U.S. Special Operations teams go into and out of about 130 different countries annually on missions and few of anyone knows they were there) that most of the people (peasants, farmers, working class) only want to live their lives and to be left alone by violent and corrupt factions that won’t leave them alone. They do not want to get involved. They keep their heads down and work hard, hoping they will not be noticed and will be left alone, to survive the daily grind to provide shelter and food for themselves and their families.
Most people aren’t willing to risk their lives to stop monsters like MAGA Dictator Donald John Trump or Putin, and every country and every civilization throughout recorded human history has had their shares of toxic, malignant monsters like Trump and Putin.
One example would be China’s Taiping Rebellion led by a failed Confucian scholar, who converted to Christianity in the early 19th century and then claimed he was Jesus Christ’s younger Chinese brother. Historians claim the rebellion that one man started was the bloodiest and most violent in human history before the Qing Dynasty with help from the European colonial Empires, that included the United States, crushed the Tapings. As many as 100+ million people may have died. The Taiping movement may have been to China what MAGA is to the US.
At the same time those colonial empires were hoping the Qing Dynasty defeat the Christian Tapings, they fought two opium wars to force the Qing Dynasty to let them sell opium in China.
The converted Christian Taiping’s leader was against opium. His capital was in Nanjing.
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Wow. You are a priceless source of knowledge, LLOYD. I wish you had been my world history teacher!
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Looking forward to seeing you there, Diane.
How prescient it turns out to be that last year’s lecture was by Azar Nifisi.
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Since she lectured at Wellesley, Azar Nafisi has become a dear friend. We exchange emails. She’s a wonderful person.
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