What Big Word Did Hampshire College’s Commencement Speaker Use for Trump?

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2017/05/26/whats-big-word-did-hampshire-colleges-commencement-speaker-use-for-trump/

AMHERST, Mass. — This year’s graduates of Hampshire College, the school that famously stopped flying the American flag following the President Donald Trump’s win over Democrat Hillary Clinton to placate angry students who had set fire to Old Glory in the wake of the election, got to enjoy one last “woke” Trump-bashing moment prior to exiting the school for good.

In her commencement keynote address to the Class of 2017, Princeton University professor and Black Lives Matter activist Keeeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was showered with applause after declaring that “the president of the United States, the most powerful politician in the world, is a racist, sexist megalomaniac.”

During the course of her 20-minute speech last week, it took Taylor only a little over two minutes before she tore into Trump.

“You are graduating into a world of uncertainty and one that is increasingly dangerous,” Taylor to graduates. “These dangers manifest themselves in a variety of ways, and perhaps the most extreme illustration, now resides in the White House.

“From the terror-inducing raids into the communities of undocumented immigrants, to his disparaging of refugees in search of freedom and respite, he has empowered an attorney general [Jeff Sessions] who embraces and promulgates policies that already been proven to have a devastating impact on black families and communities.”

Taylor continued that Trump “thinks climate science is fake” and claimed that Trump’s “eagerness to take the country into war can only be interpreted as a callous disregard for its steep price in both money and human life.”

She further accused the Trump presidency of already acting upon the “promises of a campaign organized and built upon racism, corporatism, and militarism.”

At times Taylor pivoted away from her haranguing of Trump. She took turns accusing the working press, “popular culture, and a political class” of failing to be “curious about the lives of regular people.”

If they were curious, Taylor claimed, “we would find a deepening crisis of opioid addiction as tens of thousands of people risk and succumb to overdose to escape the pain and uncertainty of life in the world as it is today.”

“The status-quo is found in the suffocating racism and poverty in Chicago that has created the conditions  for debilitating gun violence in city streets that has taken hundreds of black and brown lives,” Taylor added.

Taylor also ripped the media’s coverage of the dropping of the “mother of all bombs” last month in Afghanistan.

“We have a media that is more concerned and interested in the size of the bomb than in the human lives that have been destroyed by it,” Taylor noted.

Afghan officials have stated that the dropping of the GBU-43B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb killed a minimum of 94 Islamic State militants.

Taylor, who teaches African-American studies at Princeton University, noted that she had originally applied to enter Hampshire after graduating high school but was turned down. She is credited with being one of the lead organizers of the International Women’s Strike on International Women’s Day that followed Trump’s inauguration.

She has also authored the book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

“A world free of borders is possible if we are willing to fight for it,” she said at the conclusion of her address.