“We are witnessing,” the engaging Black Lives Matter founder/hash-tagger Patrisse Cullors told a full theater audience of predominantly white University of Iowa students in downtown Iowa City last Monday night, “the erosion of U.S. democracy.” President Trump, Cullors said, “is building a police state.”
“We must hold our elected officials accountable,” Ms. Cullors added, after giving an address in which she related having gone into a two-week depression after Hillary Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump. She had not expected Trump to win.
Ms. Cullors told the audience that she knew how to fight Hillary Clinton but “not how to fight fascism.” She wonders now BLM did “enough to educate people about the differences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, between fascism and neoliberalism.”
It was good to see Ms. Cullors receive a standing campus-town ovation after a talk in which she recounted how the murder of Trayvon Martin by “security guard” George Zimmerman “cracked open white peoples’ fantasy” about a “post-racial America” in the Age of Obama.
It was good to hear the audience laugh when she mocked the many whites who told her during the Obama years that Blacks had nothing more to demand from America because “you’ve got the White House, what more do you want?” (As if racism is about nothing more than the color of people’s faces in high places. I warned about this from the start of the Obama phenomenon).
It was good…