One professor of constitutional law at Gonzaga University has taken to the prestigious Journal of the American Bar Association to gripe about his experience with a law student who chose to express his free speech by wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.
According to Jeffrey Omari, a visiting assistant professor in the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Gonzaga University School of Law, the act of wearing campaign-themed clothing in reference to the president is an act of “white supremacy,” designed to inflict hate on anyone who may disagree with President Trump.
“MAGA is an undeniable symbol of white supremacy and hatred toward certain nonwhite groups,” Omari writes. “For its supporters, MAGA indexes an effort to return to a time in American history when this country was ‘great’ for some —particularly, propertied white men — but brutally exclusionary for others, most notably women and people of color.”
Omari goes a step further, and complains that when he expressed his concerns to his law colleagues, he was told by some to merely ignore the student and not let it bother him. He still believed that such a response would not adequately express the exclusion and mental detriment he apparently felt by seeing the MAGA hat in his classroom.
“These suggestions often fail to mitigate the visceral feelings of exclusion that African Americans and other faculty of color encounter in the academy,” wrote Omari. “Such feelings are a contributing factor to the low retention rates of students and faculty of color at certain institutions and also play a part in the high rates of mental health issues experienced by many of those in higher educational settings.”
While Omari was certain to express the disdain that he harbors toward Trump, he did not mention the bipartisan criminal justice overhaul signed into law by the president, or how it has helped over a thousand inmates win substantial reductions in their prison sentences for drug offenses. Recent analysis has shown that over 90% of the inmates who were given reduced prison sentences under Trump’s new criminal justice overhaul are African Americans.
John Patrick (@john_pat_rick) is a graduate of Canisius College and Georgia Southern University. He interned for Red Alert Politics during the summer of 2012 and has continued to contribute regularly.
