On April 4, the University of Massachusetts Amherst Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) Department hosted a lecture with Robin D. G. Kelley, a Gary B. Nash endowed chair in U.S. history and professor of African American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, in the Integrative Learning Center.

He began his lecture with a recent story involving the killing of Jordan Neely by ex-marine Daniel Penny, whom “MAGA leaders call an American hero, a patriot.”

According to Kelley, the treatment and praise Penny received from President Donald Trump made him “the perfect symbol for America’s fascist term under Trump and Project 2025’s plan to dismantle much of the administrative state, curtail civil liberties, concentrate power in the executive branch and redistribute wealth upwards.”

With this perspective, Kelley discussed Project 2025’s origins in ‘Alt-Right eugenicists’ “[who] insisted that some groups or stocks were not suitable for freedom or self-rule precisely because of their genetic makeup.”

He applied these ideas to Trump’s current actions, detailing how the Trump administration is defunding medical research and dismantling departments such as the Environmental Protection Agency, all while shielding corporations from consequences.

Trump’s latest executive orders regarding LGBTQIA+ health, Kelley said, “facilitate the destruction of trans people as an identity group, stripping them of any federal recognition or any legal protections. And you know what that’s called? It’s called genocide.”

Shemon Salam, senior lecturer in STPEC, stated that universities are yielding to Trump’s fascist ideologies, caring more about universities than the students and workers.

Universities across the U.S. are currently struggling as international students face deportation under the Trump administration for participating in pro-Palestinian protests. Salam acknowledged students, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, who “are fighting the Trump administration.”

Kelley also focused on how this fascism wasn’t new to the Black community, but the “new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America” that was “based on racial classification and hierarchy, on colonial domination, capitalist exploitation and violence,” referencing Langston Hughes.

Kelley connected the rise of fascism to the start of WWII in Africa, which entailed “abandoning democracy and civil liberties under the guise of [a] state of emergency, an authoritarian state built on an ideology of racial destiny,” with the justification of racial and ethnic cleansing.

He said that the Nazis drew upon American eugenicist ideas about the purity of blood and Aryan superiority. These ideologies were not just present in German fascism, “but they were evidence of existing fascism in the U.S. South,” he continued.

Kelley explained that WWII didn’t resolve the issue of fascism: “In fact, it expanded.”

During the open question section, professor of history and Africana studies in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, Amilcar Shabazz, asked if people would be able to speak and discuss honestly after all the history that Kelley shared, adding how he was unaware of the history of his hometown until he got to college and read a poem by Langston Hughes about the race riots.

Commenting that Hughes wrote the poem to document history, Kelley said, “The real work of making sure it’s on paper, making sure it’s published, making sure it’s available.”

Kelley emphasized the need to understand places, their histories and how they work. “Once you do that, you’re studying power.”

Kelley then considered the history of the Black communities’ solidarity with Palestine, and the idea of the United States’ weaponization of antisemitism. “The current regime demands fealty to Israel, but not to the Jewish community.”

According to Kelley, people need to think “beyond nation and pledging allegiance not to Israel, not to the United States, but to the world and all life, all living things.”

“The Black Radical tradition understood that the only way to ensure our survival was to envision a radically different future for all of us,” Kelley said. “Everyone in it, even the people we don’t like, and fight to bring it into existence.”

Seamus Kelley, a freshman STPEC student, asked how to ensure people are focusing their attention for advocacy in the right places and how to know their efforts are making the right impacts.

According to Robin D. G. Kelley, not knowing what to focus on is “the whole point of being in a movement … [you] struggle, you refocus and you don’t always get things right … and getting things wrong is a dialectical process.”

STPEC Program Director and Associate Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, Toussaint Losier, said the STPEC program is unique to UMass and prepares students to engage with society and develop their own methods of advocacy.

“To all the students here, you are the hope and currently the front line against Trump,” Salam said, commending STPEC students in particular for their activism, courage and dedication to a “fundamentally different world outside of capitalism, transphobia, patriarchy, colonialism and racism.”

Kalina Kornacki contributed to the reporting of this event.

Norah Stewart can be reached at [email protected]. Elizabeth Kim can be reached at [email protected].