Professor Watchlist

Christopher Sebastian Parker P.h.D. is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. According to his university profile, his academic specialties are “American Politics, Identity, Race, Ethnicity, [and] Public Opinion.”

In 2013, Parker published a book about the American Tea Party movement called Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America 

In the book, Parker draws “connections between the Tea Party and right-wing reactionary movements of the past, including the Know Nothing Party, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and the John Birch Society,” according to the Princeton University Press overview.

In 2016, Parker wrote an article for The American Prospect entitled “Do Trump’s Racist Appeals Have a Silver Lining?” Parker cites his claim that Trump is racist on the former President’s statement about immigrants during his 2016 campaign, in which Trump said:​​“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” 

Parker claims a new racism has emerged to replace the racism of segregation and Jim Crow:  

“With the civil-rights laws that made segregation illegal, and the death of Jim Crow in the South, this old-fashioned racism gave way to a “new racism” built not on laws but on racial stereotypes.”

He also argues ,“Certain code words often accompan[y] this new racism. In the beginning, the term “equal opportunity” was often paired with such code words and phrases as “law and order” and “welfare queen.” 

In a 2020 article called “Check your Patriotism”, Parker states that the African-Americans killed by police officers, such as Sandra Bland and George Floyd,  “were effectively lynched.”

Regarding the Fourth of July, Parker wrote, “this holiday is a sham, a fraud to the 13% of the population whose forebears were slaves. By any metric, Black people remain second-class citizens. Whether it’s life expectancy, wealth or achieving a college education, Black people lag behind whites. (I can easily identify other criteria, but space limits recommend otherwise.)”

Yet, in the following paragraph of the article, he claims that the solution “to get the country on the right track”, is patriotism, which requires sacrifice and “commitment to the values on which the country is founded: freedom, equality, tolerance.” He claims patriotism was the motivation behind previous American progressive movements like “the women’s movement, labor movement and the civil rights movement.”

Published — November 1, 2022