As a ‘woke’ NC professor, here’s how I responded when a Trump official visited campus | Opinion

Note: The title of a book in this column contains a word that may be offensive to readers and has been reformatted.

This past February, Davidson College Republicans invited a man named Jeremy Carl to campus. Carl had served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior during Donald Trump’s first term.

Speaking before a sparse crowd, Carl said he was encouraged by what he was seeing during Trump’s second term, particularly on the issues of race and immigration. He agreed with just about everything the Trump administration was doing, including uprooting decades-deep civil rights laws and protections, as well as the harsh and barbaric deportation efforts.

He had played a role in implanting those ideas, he told us.

He said more than that as he discussed his latest book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”

His position is a clear one, that real discrimination in 21st century America isn’t waged against Black people, but against white Americans. He claimed that the Marvel movie “Black Panther” and “Birth of a Nation,” the classic movie that valorized the domestic terror group the Ku Klux Klan, were opposite sides of the same coin, one anti-white, the other anti-Black. He said the much-celebrated Broadway play “Hamilton” spread anti-white sentiments.

Carl believes Trump has never done or said anything racist. He argued President Joe Biden was the real racist for having only one white Protestant in his Cabinet. Though “mistakes were made,” the Tuskegee experiment — when the government withheld crucial treatment from Black men just to see how a disease unfolds in the body over time — was not about race, he continued.

He urged Davidson College Republicans to sue Davidson because of what he described were illegal “woke” activities on campus. And he said that 75 percent of Black Davidson College students did not belong, and neither did half of our Latino students. Those supposedly undeserving students were taking the spots of qualified white students, according to Carl’s logic.

How did I respond? That is after peppering him with questions and challenges after sitting silently through his hour-long presentation?

I picked up his book, read it — then put it on the syllabus for my Debate & Deliberation course, which I’m teaching this fall. That I disagree with him passionately and fundamentally is besides the point. Carl’s work provides insight into the Trump administration’s thinking at an exceedingly important time. That’s enough reason to study and use it as a soution.

I’m pairing his book with “When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America” by Ira Katznelson, which details the ways the U.S. government built up the white middle class while purposefully excluding Black people. After reading those books, my students will grapple with “N----: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word” by South Carolina native and Harvard Professor Randall Kennedy near the end of the semester.

The goal is to equip them with the tools to walk into any arena and be able to thoroughly and ethically examine any topic and provide insight others can’t — no matter their personal views — whether that be about public policy or interpersonal disputes.

The homework assignments and in-class discussions aren’t designed to enforce the kind of “woke” groupthink I’ve seen far too many conservatives falsely claim happens in classes such as mine, including a conservative Davidson student who graduated in May and has since published a piece for the Heritage Foundation slurring some of my colleagues that way.

The assignments force students to enhance their research and reporting skills while investigating topics from a 360-degree perspective. As former students have done, current students are eager to do just that, even though speaking up about some of the topics sometimes scares the crap out of them. Next month, they’ll even be participating in a public debate against conservative members of the community, the kind of debate that will provide more light than heat.

Despite what you may have heard, we “woke” folks take our jobs seriously. We know that the classroom space is for furthering education, not producing replicas of ourselves.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy opinion writer in North Carolina and South Carolina.

This story was originally published September 8, 2025 at 5:00 AM.