Donald Trump, Race and the Crisis of American Democracy
Christopher Parker
Dissecting political strategies
Christopher Parker, scholar of racial and ethnic politics, will give a lecture at Dickinson, “Donald Trump, Race and the Crisis of American Democracy,” on Monday, Feb. 5, at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium. The lecture, which is part of the 2018 Martin Luther King Jr. & Black History Month Symposium, is free and open to the public.
Parker argues that to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020, Democrats should focus on winning people of color, rather than winning the white, working-class vote. He will discuss why he believes class-based political appeals do not work for people of color and why economic anxiety among whites was not the only reason Trump won the presidency in 2016.
Parker is Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on a behavioral approach to historical events. In addition to his academic experience, Parker served in the military for 10 years and spent five as a probation officer for Los Angeles County. He is the author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America and the award-winning book Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South.
The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity.
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Published January 26, 2018