University of Southern California (USC) professor Shaun Harper warned in a now-deleted Forbes op-ed that the assassination attempt against President Donald Trump may “appeal to black voters.”
The self-described diversity, equity, and inclusion expert released an article titled “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Trump’s Next Appeal To Black Voters” just a day after the attempted assassination arguing that Trump may use the incident as a “problematic strategy” to link himself to the prevalence of gun violence in black communities. The Saturday shooting at a Pennsylvania campaign rally injured the former president and two others, and left one man dead.
“Hopefully, being shot doesn’t become a similarly problematic strategy to link Trump with an experience that far too many (not all) Black people have,” Harper wrote. His concerns follow months of polling that indicates the former president is making inroads with black voters ahead of the November election.
After being shot in the ear and being rushed away by the Secret Service, Trump stopped to raise a triumphant fist to the crowd and chanted “fight!” which Harper claimed was the president’s attempt to relate to historic civil rights movements such as the 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute. “[T]here’s a chance that his raised fist at the Pennsylvania rally becomes erroneously connected to the Black people who were marching with fists raised in rallies in summer 2020 and at other moments in American history. Let’s hope not,” he wrote.
Harper also suggested that the shooting should provoke the former president to support calls for gun control.
“Will Trump seize the apparent assassination attempt against him as an opportunity to meaningfully address the epidemic of gun violence in America? Will he deem unacceptable the dangers to which citizens are exposed as they go to schools, places of religious worship, concerts, movie theaters, supermarkets, shopping malls, sporting events, and now, presidential campaign rallies?”
Harper is “one of the nation’s most highly respected racial equity experts” according to the university’s website. As executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center, his research focuses “primarily on race, gender, and other dimensions of equity in an array of organizational contexts.”
In 2022, Harper was appointed to the National Board for Education Sciences by President Joe Biden.
Harper, Forbes and USC did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
(Featured image credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)
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