The Speech Racists Didn’t Want You to Hear
Fox News tried to intimidate Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from speaking. Now we're printing her words in full.
Earchiel Lee Johnson / People’s World
After her commencement address at Hampshire College, author and Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor endured a campaign of intimidation and abuse when alt-right media websites, followed by Fox News, smeared the views she expressed. After receiving threats of violence through the Internet and in person, Taylor decided to cancel a speech for Town Hall Seattle, scheduled for early June, on racism in the Trump era in early June. “The cancellation of my speaking events is a concession to the violent intimidation that was, in my opinion, provoked by Fox News,” Taylor wrote in a statement. “But I am releasing this statement to say that I will not be silent.”
On July 6, in defiance of the racist harassment, Taylor gave the speech she couldn’t in Seattle — at the Socialism 2017 conference in Chicago. Here we are printing the text of that speech as a co-publication of Socialist Worker, Jacobin, and the International Socialist Review, three co-sponsors of the conference. Taylor has been a contributor to these publications among many others, and is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
Obviously, they don’t mind illegals coming in. They don’t mind drugs pouring in. They don’t mind, excuse me, MS-13 coming in. We’re getting them all out of here . . . Members of Congress who will be voting on border security have a simple choice: They can either vote to help drug cartels and criminal aliens trying to enter the United States, like, frankly, the Democrats are doing. Or they can vote to help American citizens and American families be safe. That’s the choice. Who do you want to represent you? We’re finding the illegal immigrant drug dealers, gang members and killers, and removing them from our country. And once they are gone, folks — you see what we’re doing — they will not let them back in. They’re not coming back.
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