However, since then, Muhammad said, the country has regressed: “It looks like we have the underpinnings of textbook fascism.” The Voting Rights Act has been gutted and voter suppression activity has grown exponentially, and the country has seen the political ascendency of Donald Trump, who touted the birther conspiracy and attempted to criminalize Black resistance movements, such as Black Lives Matter. Today, Muhammad said, we are seeing “the absolute erasure of truth and education in this country,” including bills to ban books, and attacks on DEI efforts and education on race (including, specifically, an HKS course that Muhammad and Smith created).
“It is not the case, in my opinion, that this country has ever been able to accept the role of Black people included in this democracy at a scale that would not fundamentally threaten what America thinks of itself,” Muhammad said.
Cornell William Brooks, the Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the Kennedy School, considered how the state of Black America reflects the state of American democracy broadly. Brooks, a former president and CEO of the NAACP, referred to the National Urban League’s long-running annual State of Black America Report. “We are in a moment where people question whether there should be a State of Black America report,” he said. “Should we speak in racially specific terms and with analytic granularity about Black people as such?”
“When we talk about the state of Black America, we are talking about the state of America and the state of this democracy. … When Black people’s lives are in peril, when Black people’s access to the ballot box is in peril, so is the country.”