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Last week, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter told former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to his face she would not have voted for him because he’s Indian.

“There is a core national identity that is the identity of the WASP,” Coulter said on Ramaswamy’s “Truth” podcast, using an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. “And that doesn’t mean we can’t take anyone else in ― a Sri Lankan or a Japanese, or an Indian. But the core around which the nation’s values are formed is the WASP.”

Interestingly, Ramaswamy appeared unfazed by her insulting remarks and declared they shared an opposition to dual citizenship. He further stated, “that a child of immigrants would have greater loyalty to the country than disgruntled seventh-generation WASPs.” Despite such blatant, vulgar racism, Ramaswamy later praised her on social media, writing, “I disagree with her but respect that she had the guts to speak her mind.”

The truth is Ramaswamy is not alone in this regard. There are more than a few conservatives of color who have engaged in the art of self-debasement.

Back in 2021, South Carolina senator Tim Scott claimed with a straight face woke supremacy was as bad as white supremacy. In response, former CNN anchor Don Lemon spoke truth to power, alerting the senator, in no uncertain terms, to the undeniable truth that there is no comparison between the two camps. As the days passed, a few other commentators took Scott to task for his wayward, untoward commentary.

A Black man who hails from humble beginnings, (as he has described his background and upbringing) and the inhabitant of a state that has had an ugly, intensive, brutal and oppressive history of mistreatment of Black people (even by southern state standards), Scott likely knew better than to utter such dishonest foolishness. To add insult to injury, he went to Fox News and tried (unconvincingly) to defend his disingenuous remarks.

More recently, Scott has come under not-so-friendly fire due to his lap dogging for Donald Trump, telling the former president that “he just loves him.”

Scott is a person of color in a party that has declared political war on people of color. Thus, in order to save face and remain in the good graces of his GOP colleagues, Scott has opted to engage in shameful acts of intellectual dishonesty. His vacuous opportunism and misapplied priorities are sad and shameful.

We can’t ignore Nikki Haley, who behaved manner similar to that of Vivek Ramaswamy. The former governor and U.N. ambassador initially tied herself into political pretzels by refusing to denounce the confederate flag or criticize her former boss. She insulted many people when she argued that she disagrees with those who deny that the confederate flag represents racism, yet nonetheless respects their point of view.

Seriously, ambassador Haley? How can you simultaneously be for and against racism? Taking such a position is not that much different from when President Trump referred to white supremacists and anti-racist activists as “very fine people.” The latter group is commendable. The first group is anything but.

Trump went after Haley’s birth name, Nimarata, in yet another example of the former president employing racially-coded dog whistles to attack his presidential rivals. Trump also falsely stating she is ineligible to become president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born in 1972. Haley initially behaved as if nothing was wrong. It was only afterwards, under extreme criticism from never Trumpers and independent Republicans, that she finally took off the gloves and began swinging.

Haley, who commented that her father had to teach at a historically Black college and university because he was unable to secure employment at a white institution of higher learning, continues to espouse the notion that “America was never a racist nation.” She does this even as Trump continues to levy thinly-veiled racist attacks at her.

Throughout history, there have been many others who have embraced groups and movements that stand in direct opposition to their religious or cultural heritage. It is important to note that such individuals exist on the political left as well. Opportunism is a bipartisan enterprise.

Some of this can be chalked up to confusion, self-hatred or other psychological maladies. Regardless, such retrograde antics perpetrated by intensely deluded and disingenuous men and women are a sad commentary, and says a lot more about them as opposed to the people or movements they have decided to fervently attack.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

Editor’s note: This column have been updated to include the correct name of an individual identified as shouting racial epithets.

History on the rerun. Ghosts of Mississippi. Magnolia State maintains its horrendously racist image.

Any of the statements could be used to describe the images shown across the nation last weekend at the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

Dozens of students at the university’s flagship campus gathered last week to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and to call for the school to be transparent in its potential dealings with Israel. These demonstrators were confronted with hundreds of counter-protesters, in contrast to the few dozen pro-Palestinian protesters.

Less than an hour after the protest began, police disbanded it – notably after counter-protesters threw items at the pro-Palestinian group. Police safely evacuated the pro-Palestinian students as the largely white, male group of counter-protesters chanted: “Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, hey, goodbye,” “Who’s your daddy?”, “USA”, “Hit the showers”, “Your nose is huge” and, in one instance, included a white man making monkey noises at a Black woman.

On Sunday, Phi Delta Theta fraternity responded in a statement, saying it was aware of the video that showed the actions of one counter-protester and had removed that individual, identified as James “JP” Staples, from membership.“The racist actions in the video were those of an individual and are antithetical to the values of Phi Delta Theta and the Mississippi Alpha chapter,” the statement read.

In response to such an odious incident, the University of Mississippi’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People stated: “The behavior witnessed today was not only abhorrent but also entirely unacceptable,” the statement reads. “It is deeply disheartening to witness such blatant disregard for the principles of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.” Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote, “This is a video showing anti-Blackness,” reposting Collins’ post. “This is a sitting Congressman applauding it.”

Shockingly, there were those who condoned and applauded such deplorable behavior. Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, shared the viral video on X saying, “Ole Miss taking care of business.” Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, who himself recently declared April as Confederate Heritage Month and April 29 as Confederate Memorial Day, captioned a video of the counter-protesters singing the national anthem with “the ‘protests’ at Ole Miss today. Watch with sound. Warms my heart. I love Mississippi!”

Given his previous endorsement of racist legacies, such retrograde remarks should hardly be surprising. .

This overtly racist commentary parallels the Mississippi of yesteryear. In September 1962, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett –  a staunch and defiant segregationist – spoke to an all-white crowd of more than 40,000 people at the University of Mississippi football game against Kentucky. As Confederate flags waved, Barnett said: “I love Mississippi. I love her people. Our customs. I love and respect our heritage.”

The next day, an insurrection took place on campus as James Meredith enrolled, becoming the first known Black student in the university’s history.

Realizing that he stated the quiet part out too loud (at least for a governor) Reeves parroted statements similar to those echoed by Joe Biden the morning of the protests. In Biden’s statements on the protests around the nation, he said: “We’ve all seen images, and they put to the test two fundamental American principles … The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.”

Jailyn R. Smith, the young woman who was the subject of the attacks, made it clear the juvenile comments did not get to her

“The monkey gestures – and people calling me fat or Lizzo – didn’t hurt my feelings, because I know what I am,” Smith said. “I am so confident in my Blackness. I am so confident in my size, in the way that I wear my hair, and who I am. They do not bother me. If anything, I felt pity for them for how stupidly they acted,”

Smith, who is scheduled to graduate later this month, certainly demonstrated herself to be the mature, decent human being in this sordid encounter.

This incident at Ole miss gives adage to the statement “the more things change; they stay the same.”

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

To say that the following academic year has been riveting for higher education is an understatement.

When presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology testified before Congress in December, they tried to go down the path of nuance and complexity, guided by legal counsel. The result was a public relations disaster, shortly after which both Gay and Magill resigned. It was widely agreed the three institutions had suffered serious damage, but not as serious as that which Columbia and several other high-profile campuses have recently suffered.

In retrospect, the three presidents’ decision to address genuinely complex issues in a nuanced fashion — at the possible cost of their careers — looks admirable. In contrast, Minouche Shafik, the current president of Columbia University, has managed to place herself in the middle of a firing squad with heavy artillery coming from all directions. Students, faculty, donors, alumni, politicians at all levels, and others have viewed Shafik with a jaundiced, disappointed, and wary eye. Many people from across the religious and political spectrum were shocked that she capitulated to arbitrary premises and refused to support fundamental academic principles of sincere inquiry and freedom of expression.

Many people, including me, vehemently denounce anti-Semitism, one of the oldest and most vile hatreds in history. But we should all pause and reflect before concluding that the cohort of right-wing politicians who conducted the hearing were genuinely interest in protecting the well being of Jewish students. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, has avidly touted white nationalist conspiracy theories.  Rep. Rick Allen, a right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia, routinely quotes Bible verses as a vehicle for dictating policy at a religiously diverse, pluralistic, secular university.

No, the purpose of this supposed “genuine inquiry” was to attack higher education as bastions of critical thinking.

The truth is that conservatives have long used a racist playbook as a guide to political victory. Examples include the mid-1960s, when the far right seized control of the Republican Party from the moderate Rockefeller wing; Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern strategy in 1968 and 1972; Ronald Reagan’s “big Black Bucks and welfare queens” trope that he invoked during his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 for defending universal human rights; George H. W. Bush’s racist stereotyping of Willie Horton in 1988; and George W. Bush’s “protection from terrorism” and the Obama birther conspiracy theories in 2008.

We are now well into another crucial election year in an America that remains heavily polarized. The racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of white grievance that Donald Trump and his campaign intentionally agitated during his victory in 2016 and were narrowly defeated in 2020 have returned in 2024 with an additional list of fresh faces whose targets remain largely the same: women, non-Whites, immigrants, and those deemed “other.”

A university’s role is to teach students how to think critically and courageously. The college campus is the supposed citadel for the rational examination and exchange of ideas. This means that students might indeed feel unsettled when their world views differ from their peers’ or when what they discuss in class — or hear on campus — challenges their beliefs. This can be a positive thing. University education involves learning to engage in disagreement, even confrontation, and to contest ideas rather than seek to suppress them.

If we are being honest, the truth is that Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx, and their Republican colleagues have no real interest in solving campus problems. Their goal is to expose supposed liberal elites as dangerou and anti-American. They falsely promote themselves as heroic saviors capable of and determined to attack such sinister enemies into submission, if not outright silence.

Such an effort cannot be allowed to succeed for the survival of higher education or our nation’s future.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

For almost a decade, Donald Trump has sent the Republican Party and much of the mainstream media into a political whirlwind. Trump’s bombastic behavior and searing personal attacks have angered many establishment Republicans while endearing him to hard-line conservatives.

But it’s nothing new for the Grand Old Party.

Over the past half-century, Republicans has engaged in behavior that has allowed individuals like Trump to rise and flourish in its ranks. Much of it can be traced back to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where the radical right elements of the party successfully wrestled power away from the more centrist Rockefeller wing, which they snidely referred to as a group comprising “weak sissified men.”

At this same convention, the more racist delegates verbally and, in some cases, physically attacked some of the few Black and other non-white delegates, including baseball legend Jackie Robinson. It was also in 1964 that Congress ratified the landmark Civil Rights Act.

Approval of this monumental piece of legislation caused such vehement dissension and outrage among so many conservatives (among them was Dixiecrat leader Strom Thurmond, who secretly fathered a Black child with his family’s maid) they denounced the Democratic Party and became Republicans. Thus, in the minds of many GOP men, genuine red-blooded men were hard-core segregationists.

Capitalizing on those sentiments, the GOP apparatus, led by its 1968 nominee Richard Nixon, employed the infamous Southern strategy. A number of southern governors of the era, notably Alabama Gov. George Wallace, employed this strategy (along with the slogan “law and order”) in their campaigns to appeal to white southern Democrats who were growing ever resentful at what they saw as America’s growing diversification and radicalization. This was a message that played on the racial resentments of whites while promoting segregationist themes.

With Nixon successfully winning the presidency in 1968, this sort of political dog whistle politics among Republican operatives was the standard for more than two decades.

General dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter’s performance, coupled with international crises, allowed this form of resentment politics to return in the early 1980s. Indeed, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign started off in Philadelphia, Miss., advocating for states’ rights. It’s the same city where the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights activists in July 1964: 25-year-old Michael Schwerner, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman (both white and Jewish), and 19-year-old James Chaney. Their killers justified the murders as crucial in preserving their way of life and protecting white women from supposed “communists and outside agitators.”

Understandably, the optics of Reagan’s move sent shock waves through liberal political circles at the time. This was the same campaign that would refer to “welfare queens” riding around in pink Cadillacs and sexually objectifying Black men by referring to “Big Black Bucks” using food stamps to purchase T-bone steaks. Radical leftists and “militant feminists” were also targets of their cowboy diplomacy campaign and conservative message. This strategy managed to secure Reagan two terms as president.

This would continue in 1988 when the George H.W. Bush campaign “Hortonized” Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis by running an ad depicting the story of a Massachusetts prisoner, Willie Horton, who had murdered a young White couple while out on a weekend furlough. This message was designed to play on the fears of conservative whites, who harbored unhinged fears of Black men.

In 1992, the GOP bought out its best and brightest extreme elements at its party convention in Houston, Texas. From 700 Club host Pat Robertson arguing that feminism encouraged women to refuse to bake cookies to eventual presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan declaring America was in the midst of a cultural war, it looked as if party lunatics had taken over the convention asylum. Many political pundits argued that such a spectacle was the reason William Jefferson Clinton and the Democratic Party captured the White House for the first time since 1976.

It remains to be seen how the 2024 election will turn out. However, one thing is for certain: Trump’s rabid, unrestrained behavior is nothing new for the GOP. He embodies the spirit, values, and message that have defined a sizable segment of the Republican Party for more than half a century.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

For those too young to fully remember the OJ Simpson trial, it was a television spectacle with all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Sex and violence, interracial relationships and marriage, infidelity, alcoholism, sexual deviancy and a host of lurid details that titillated and fascinated the public. Stories covering the trial became daily tidbits, as just about every outlet – from weekly tabloids to highbrow magazines and newspapers – intensely covered the trial. You also had a real life cast of characters that would have been a fiction writer’s dream.

The strong, handsome, sex symbol former Hall of Fame athlete. The former beauty queen, blonde-haired, blued-eyed murdered wife. Her tall, dark and handsome murdered body builder friend. The blond-haired hedonistic beach boy. The Latin housekeeper. The Asian judge. The white/Jewish female prosecutor. The Black male prosecutor. The Black male defense attorney. The legendary WASP attorney. The Jewish defense attorney. The Black ex-wife and kids from his first marriage. Biracial kids from his second marriage. The white racist cop and police force.

It went on and on. A theater of the surreal.

The trial, like many other issues in America, exposed the large racial divide in our nation. The country was largely divided among racial lines, with 62 percent of whites believing Simpson was guilty of murder and 68 percent of Blacks feeling that he was innocent, according to a CNN poll conducted at the time. Charges that the defense team, lead by the late Johnnie Cochran, was playing the “race card” to Time magazine darkening Simpson’s face on its cover elicited outrage from certain segments of the Black community and further divided the public. The racial gulf remained after the trial.

Many white Americans were shocked and outraged by witnessing groups of blacks cheering the verdict. To many, such jubilation demonstrated a high level of callousness and indifference to the plight of two brutally murdered victims.

On the contrary, for many Black Americans, the verdict represented vindication from a justice system that had for so long mistreated and incarcerated so many Black people, who in a number of cases were unjustly prosecuted without probable cause. Simpson was probably an afterthought. The cheering was for how Johnnie Cochran, the Black lead defense attorney, so skillfully, eloquently and powerfully commanded that courtroom.

Once he was implicated in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her body builder, waiter friend, Ronald Goldman, the once Black Prince Charming image Simpson worked so hard to cultivate quickly evaporated. The fact Nicole Brown Simpson was a blond haired, blue eyed former beauty queen intensified the hatred toward Simpson, particularly in racially-conscious social circles. Race did indeed matter!

It is very telling that many of Simpson’s critics (mostly White) who ruthlessly took him to task (and in my opinion, justifiably so) for two gruesome murders seemed to either overlook or ignore the fact that Claus Von Bulow, Robert Blake and several other White men were exonerated under similar circumstances. In the case of Von Bulow, he went on to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair and became a social fixture in New York society circles.

Both sides were passionate in their stances. However, most rational people know that Simpson was incarcerated in 2008 for nearly a decade, largely for failing to be convicted in 1995. The judge and predominately white jury in the second trial were determined to see Simpson face justice for what they saw as his failure to face consequences in his initial 1995 acquittal. Even most legal experts conceded as much, arguing that under normal circumstances, most people would have likely received less than three years or even probation for the sort of crime Simpson was involved in.

Moreover, anyone being honest with themselves knows that if Simpson had been accused of murdering his first wife, Marguerite Henry Simpson, a Black woman, the searing level of public outrage and craven level of print and electronic media coverage would not have been anywhere near as intense. I would argue that might have ended up a minor cover story in Jet or Ebony Magazine, and not much elsewhere. Such attitudes demonstrate that Black lives are too often of little significance to the larger society.

I was among those Black Americans, in the minority at the time, who felt Simpson was guilty. I still feel that way. That being said, from an intellectual standpoint, I could see why the jury came to the conclusion it did. The prosecution failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

Thanks to the so-called culture wars, debates about events on college campuses are being employed as useful weapons for attacking the gradual democratization that has occurred in higher education since the 1950s.

Those of us who are academics and see education as crucial should be alarmed at the specter of partisan attacks, not to mention the garish and outlandish headlines that adversely affect many people trying to make sense of and understand their lives.

Academic freedom, a term the American Association of University Professors developed in the mid-20th century, was designed to provide freedom of and protection for the pursuit of knowledge by faculty members, whose primary purpose is to educate, acquire knowledge, and conduct research inside and outside the halls of academia. That lines up with the constitution’s protection of free speech and affirms the necessity of academic freedom to the right to education and the institutional independence of higher education institutions.

Nonetheless, across the nation, attacks on free speech have steadily increased. Over the past few years, right-wing groups opposed to the teaching of critical race theory have tried to undermine such important concepts by attempting to restrict the discussion of history, literature, and other disciplines within the humanities.

Such intense paranoia about supposedly “woke” campuses has materialized into actual laws from Florida to Alabama, where Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill that supposedly limits the teaching of “divisive” topics in the state’s colleges and universities. The bill is similar to Florida’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in public colleges, which was signed into law last May. Both measures are overt attacks on learning that attempt to divorce liberal and progressive beliefs and ideas from the classroom.

The conservative right has been on the warpath in its efforts to curtail academic freedom. According to the The Chronicle of Higher Education, Republican lawmakers have proposed 81 anti-DEI bills across 28 states.

That is why a recent report released by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup about how policies and laws shape college enrollment attracted my intense interest. The report was part of a comprehensive survey about students’ experiences of higher education.

Upon reading the report, I came to one major conclusion: intensely histrionic and dramatized discussions about so-called woke campuses dominating higher education do not correlate with the sentiments or concerns of many, or perhaps, most college students. The report’s key findings expose how grossly distorted our national debate over higher education has become and how out of sync Republican-led public higher education systems are with the majority of college students.

As for supposedly “divisive” concepts the right routinely decries about? It turns out students are interested in such ideas. Most of these students, the report notes, state they do not want limitations on what they can discuss in the classroom. What is more noteworthy is that students’ opinions do not conform with the hyper-political partisanship that saturates and intensely populates headlines.

In interviewing students who are concerned about this issue, some political differences are likely to be expected. However, students are nowhere near as politically stratified as a confluence of outside factors might have led one to believe. In fact, more than 60% of Republicans who care about this issue when selecting a college prefer that states do not restrict instruction on topics related to race and gender (compared to 83% of Democrats and 78% of independents).

College and university campuses are the supposed citadels for the rational examination and exchange of ideas. They should be centers where students have access to specific information shaping current societal discussions and where faculty members are encouraged to engage in their mission as public intellectuals, even when espousing unpopular discourse that exposes harsh realities about the past and present.

I make it clear to my students during the first class of every semester they are no longer in high school and that life is not multiple choice, though it can be somewhat true and false (the latter comment always gets a few laughs). I also  inform students none of us will be totally comfortable with everything we encounter or hear, and that as human beings, we must be expected to acclimate to various situations and environments. The fact that people are occasionally taken out of their comfort zones can be a positive thing.

Campuses must make a valiant effort to protect free speech and advocate mutually respectful dialogue. Administrators must make serious and committed efforts to protect the rights of faculty and students who become targets of attack for expressing controversial or unpopular viewpoints. These efforts are crucial, given our current political and societal landscape.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

Leave it to the right to make a cheap attempt to capitalize off human tragedy.

For most people, the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last week was a disaster of horrific proportions. Americans across the political spectrum expressed their sorrow and prayers toward the victims and their families.

But for many in the bombastic world of right-wing conservatism, it presented an opportunity to partake in one of their favorite hobbies: injecting racism into the issue at hand.

As first responders frantically plunged into the frigid waters of the Patapsco River looking for survivors, the right-wing machine was using the tragedy to further agitate its ongoing xenophobic and bigoted campaign toward immigrants and the perceived albatross of “wokeism.”

Users on X, formerly Twitter, spread racist dog whistles alongside videos of Brandon Scott, the Black, 39-year-old mayor of Baltimore.

“This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge,” wrote one user with over 250,000 followers. “It’s going to get so, so much worse.” Anthony Sabatini, a Republican congressional candidate in Florida, posted a video of the bridge collapsing with the words “DEI did this.” Phil Lyman, a Republican state representative in Utah and current candidate for governor, wrote, “This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.” He later added, then deleted, “DEI=DIE.”

As Republicans have railed against “woke” and critical race theory — despite the fact many of them can’t specifically define what these terms really mean — they’ve have eagerly moved to nullify DEI programs and initiatives. In July 2023, Republican Rep. Alex Mooney of West Virginia introduced legislation to terminate the House DEI office, claiming the agency was Marxist in nature and inherently racist against white people (it isn’t).

Six construction workers filling potholes on the bridge were killed in the collapse. They were from Mexico Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, according to Col. Roland L. Butler Jr, the superintendent of Maryland State Police

The bodies of two were recovered after they were found trapped in a red pickup truck in the Patapsco River, according to Maryland State Police. They have been identified as Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes from Mexico and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera from Guatemala.

These are all men who came to America in pursuit of a better life for their families and themselves. These were individuals who were willing to brave freezing temperatures in the middle of the night in an effort to help improve the lives of fellow citizens.

The fact is the Baltimore bridge tragedy arrived at a moment when voters have ranked immigration as the number one issue in this year’s presidential election. That’s propelled by fearmongering over a humanitarian crisis at the southern border by GOP candidates, engineered by sadistic ring leader Donald Trump, and by Fox News hoses who foolishly asked if the crash occurred due to “the wide-open border.”

These heroic men who lost their lives were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Donald Trump would argue. On the contrary, they were adding to and rejuvenating it.

This is a moment of reckoning when we need to roundly reject the virus of xenophobia and reclaim our belief in the United States as a destination for hardworking, conscientious individuals. America is a diverse, pluralistic society. This is a goal we must strive to continue to embrace and maintain.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

From the minute President Joe Biden selected her as his running mate, Kamala Harris has been the subject of intense scrutiny.

Harris is often the subject of fierce discussion and debate, and it hard to think of a vice president in recent memory who has been placed under such a political microscope. She can hardly sneeze without someone analyzing and dissecting her every move.

From a historical perspective, the role of the vice president has often been marked with a degree of paradox and a level of ambiguity. You are one heartbeat away from the presidency, yet you are often relegated to mostly obscure duties.

Frequently, presidents and vice presidents have been odd pairings often brought together in an effort to unify diverse fragments within the party. John Kennedy selected Lyndon Johnson with the aim of assuaging the fears of southern Democrats who were weary of his Roman Catholicism and “possible allegiance” to the Vatican. Ronald Reagan chose George H.W. Bush, the former head of CIA, in an attempt to win over more centrist Republicans leery of the far-right values of Reagan voters. And the thrice married, twice impeached, convicted felon and adulterer Donald Trump recruited Mike Pence for the purpose of addressing the apprehensions of devout white evangelicals over the businessman’s moral failings and deficiencies.

Over the past three years, the common questions asked in regard to Harris have been: “Where is the vice president?”, “What is she doing in her role?”, “How come she is not more visible?” To many, the vice president has been VP non grata, seemingly absent from taking on any official political duties.

The fact is that for the first few years of her tenure as vice president, Harris was a low-key operator, promoting the Biden agenda to historically black colleges and universities, pushing women’s issues, and attempting to appeal to young voters. In this regard, she was no different from most recent vice presidents, save for Dick Cheney. Yet, unlike her predecessors, she was routinely chastised for her lack of visibility.

Until recently, rightly or wrongly, the perception of Harris has been that of a person ill-suited for the role of the vice presidency, let alone president of the United States. Her political triumphs were not appropriately announced by the Biden administration. And admittedly, some awkward moments in interviews and the ongoing media coverage depicting her as an individual who struggles to form coherent sentences have certainly not done Harris any favors. Even now, there are some who feel Harris lacks the necessary political ingredients to be successful.

No honest person can dismiss the fact that being a woman of color has been a political handicap for her. As a woman of color – and a biracial one at that – Harris has to deal with the twin evils of “Jim Crow and Jane Crow.” The term was espoused by pioneering legal scholar Pauli Murray in 1970. The intersection of race and gender has undoubtedly contributed to much of the derision from certain segments.

Republican Party operatives are already crafting the narrative to their base of supporters that given Biden’s age, it is very likely he will have to step down and hand over power to his Black female vice president. This is an image that upsets the stomachs and emotions of a large number of conservative Republicans, and if we are being honest, a segment of neoliberal and faux Democrats as well. A Black woman being elected president before a white woman would likely be a tough pill for many to swallow.

Whether her political flaws are imagined or real, Kamala Harris is a formidable politican. She remains immensely popular among Black women, the Democratic Party’s most dedicated voting bloc. Her talks at HBCUs, visits to planned parent clinics, and passionate speeches on reproductive rights have garnered her admiration among a growing number of people, as well as earning her solid marks from pundits and other political observers.

Both Biden and Harris must make a persuasive argument to fellow Democrats and swing voters on why she remains the best choice to succeed him. It is something that both of them must do unequivocally and unambiguously. Otherwise, her opponents will not hesitate to move in and attempt to so do themselves.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

I knew it was only a matter of time before segments of the right-wing media, both here in America and in Britain, would reignite their propaganda/outrage machine towards Meghan Markle, better known as The Duchess of Sussex.

Markle has been urged to defend her sister-in-law, Princess Kate, after she found herself at the center of a royal crisis thanks to an edited family photograph.

Catherine, the Princess of Wales, posed for a picture with her three children for Britain’s Mother’s Day, but fans quickly took to social media websites to point out a numerous issues with the photo. Kate conceded to altering parts of the photograph and apologized for the supposed “confusion.” Kensington Palace was under immediate pressure to explain what parts of the image were changed, while numerous royal sources declared the controversy as “exceptionally damaging” to the Royal Family.

Given the major public relations disaster the incident has morphed into, British public relations expert Ryan McCormick has called on Markle to assist her sister-in-law, saying in an interview with the Mirror, “If I was advising Meghan, I would tell her to speak loud and passionate in defence of Kate. Meghan may not like being on the brunt of negative press but, she’s definitely more familiar with it than Kate.”

“The Duchess could help the Princess of Wales tremendously by guiding her through this crisis publicly and behind the scenes,” McCormick added.

Since Meghan and Harry’s engagement in 2017, Kate and Meghan have been employed as one another’s nemesis in the press. Meghan tends to be depicted as more progressive, regal, and enticing, but also more bratty, demanding, and sinister. Kate tends to be positioned as more conservative, down to earth, and pedestrian, as well as more royal and maternal.

The two have always been intertwined and unable to be seen as independent of one another. Thus, it has been understandable that as Middleton’s absence has extended toward tawdry gossip and scandal, Meghan supporters inquired to know why the royal family was ready to grant special privileges for Kate that they would not make for Meghan. Such questions are certainly fair game.

Immediately from the outset of her involvement with Prince Harry, Markle was the target of vicious and racially-coded venom, with comments such as “Harry’s new girlfriend is straight outta Compton.” Coverage climaxed after the couple granted an interview to journalist Oprah Winfrey, where they revealed several details that shined a light on the racism – whether conscious or unconscious – among certain members of the royal family.

Perhaps, as a biracial woman who identified as such, Ms. Markle was unaware she is seen as Black. The specter of racial ambiguity is something that is forfeited. Being a woman of color, the intersection of race and gender, as the late Pauli Murray referred to as “Jane crow and Jim Crow,” is all too often commonplace. This was and is evident in the treatment she has endured from her detractors.

As the racists see it, she was wealthy and supposedly privileged, and thus, she should be grateful and engage in unadulterated mea culpas of thankfulness to Buckingham Palace and the larger British society, and stop making those “baseless and unfounded” charges of racism. In essence, they believe  Markle should stay in her supposed lane and know her place.

This was the same royal family that sat idly by and allowed (perhaps even aided and abetted, according to some sources) the level of racism directed toward Harry and Meghan, which escalated to such a volatile point they were forced to depart the United Kingdom. Now, that the seemingly favored daughter in-law, Catherine, has come under such dissecting scrutiny, people expect Markle to sweep in, come to the rescue and act as the Black mammy savior.

While such a choice is obviously Markle’s to make, at the moment, she has remained pretty mum on the entire sordid episode. Given her past history with the tabloids and the demeaning behavior of her fellow royals, a neutral stance is probably the most sagacious course of action.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

It was “The Stepford Wives” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Nearly a week later, people are still talking about the State of the Union response given by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, which has been widely mocked by politicians and pundits alike. It certainly didn’t require the skills of a futurist to realize her less-than-stellar efforts would result in a raw and ruthless parody on “Saturday Night Live.”

One Republican pollster called Britt “creepy,” while a national Republican consultant told Rolling Stone, “I’ll give Biden this — He at least gave a better speech than Katie Britt.” “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” another unnamed Republican strategist told The Daily Beast. Radio host and former Fox Newser Megyn Kelly all but served the junior senator her political severance papers.

Katie Britt was successful in one manner. She had people talking about her.

Giving the State of the Union response is pretty much a thankless job. You are in the crosshairs of the opposing party, which is bound to attack or misrepresent anything you say in an effort to discredit you. More often than not, it provides few advantages to the career of the individual who receives the ambiguous honor of delivering it.

There have been some very poor performances. Britt’s, however, was a colossal failure, a wipeout that overshadowed even the less stellar attempts such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s near drowning in 2009, Sen. Marco Rubio’s water guzzling in 2013, and Rep. Joe Kennedy appearing in front of the cameras with ChapStick plastered over his chin in 2018, prompting viewers to believe he was panting.

What tipped Britt’s lukewarm performance from merely clueless to outright obscene was its darkest moment, when she told a horrific and sadistic story that, at least by implication, turned out to be a bold-faced lie. It was about a woman Britt met when she visited the Texas border. “She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped,” Britt said. “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

Such an account appeared to be a powerful, touching, and emotional story. However, some stealth fact checking, led by journalist Jonathan Katz, revealed that although the woman in question and her experiences are accurate, they did not take place on American soil, but rather occurred in Mexico. They also occured between 2004 and 2008, more than a decade before Biden was sworn in as president. The Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded Britt four Pinocchios for the way she twisted this tragic story to make a craven partisan point.

Britt, a 42-year-old rising star in her party, was supposed to represent “America’s mom,” according to talking points that were sent around to conservative influencers before she spoke from her upscale designer kitchen. Fellow Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville commented, “She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator.” Really?

Britt is actually an an attorney who served on Capitol Hill as chief of staff to her predecessor, Richard Shelby. She was also the first woman to lead the Business Council of Alabama, which is the state’s chamber of commerce. She’s been a pioneer insofar as it relates to female politicians in Alabama, so presenting her as a housewife first reveals some alarming and major flaws behind why the GOP struggles to effectively recruit suburban women.

That deeply contradictory and problematic message is hardly reassuring during a moment when the Republican Party is attempting to dispel its image as a retrograde entity that desires to return women to the pre-1960s era.

An era of women being largely nonexistent in the workplace, primarily raising families, forced to accept physical and emotional abuse, battling mental health issues by suffering in isolation and silence, having to quietly overlook, if not, outright tolerate marital infidelity, bereft of any legal rights from the judicial system, and residing in a state of potential economic and social vulnerability by deeply mired in second-class status. Such an image will hardly prompt many women across the political and generational spectrum — particularly many millennial and Gen Z women — to embrace the party.

There are people weighing in on Katie Britt’s future. Some argue that she has likely been omitted from Trump’s short list for vice president. Others believe it will take her years to recuperate from such a politically disastrous situation.

One thing is certain. Neither the Republican National Committee nor the National Republican Party did themselves any favors by ushering Katie Britt into the political lion’s den to deliver such an ill-judged response.

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Copyright 2024 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.