What College Protests Say About America

“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black,  examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election. ​​(OPINION) – The past two weeks of campus protests have exposed the hypocrisy of Republicans who claim to stand for “law and order” and free speech. As NYPD officers converged onto Hamilton Hall at Columbia University Tuesday night, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called into Fox News and complained that police should have acted “a lot sooner.” The protesters had done “tremendous damage” to a New York City “landmark,” he told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity. This from the man who sat in the White House watching TV and doing nothing for 187 minutes when the nation’s most important landmark, the U.S. Capitol, came under attack on January 6, 2021. When it comes to “law and order,” Trump and the Republicans believe that laws should only apply to certain people. We saw this with Trump’s contradictory responses to two defining news events in his final year in office. When racial justice protests erupted in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Trump’s response was...