Harvard Professor Warns: ‘White Fear Being Weaponized’ in Trump Era

Harvard professor Khalil Muhammad said President Trump’s focus on law and order adds to “the longest story of America, which is a story that essentially said that this is a white European’s country, and everyone else has to play by our rules.”

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro of Weekend Edition Sunday invited the Cambridge academic on to discuss ways “white fear” is allegedly being “weaponized” in the Trump era and what can be done about it. {snip}

“Our current president ran as a law-and-order candidate, in a country with a long history where the notion of using the police as the foot soldiers of controlling African-Americans — limiting their freedom, deciding that they are indeed second-class citizens, and enforcing those laws when they were legal in this country — is a really big part of the problem,” Mr. Muhammad said, the media watchdog NewsBusters reported Tuesday. “And to evoke that mantra — to run on that mantra; to elicit the support of the entire community of professional police agencies — means that we’ve now got citizens who are playing out this policy choice — this set of politics. And that’s a big, big deal.”

The Harvard Kennedy School professor said it was difficult to quantitatively measure the veracity of his claims. {snip}

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“What I’m trying to suggest here is that we’ve got to come up with some policies that raise the costs of bad behavior — of treating people differently than you would want to be treated,” he added. {snip}