WASHINGTON, DC, April 10 — Today Senator Rand Paul launched a Republican offensive to recruit black students into its ranks at Howard, a historically black university. Paul invited himself to the campus and the administration bent over backwards to get students and faculty to attend this event. No academic department or student organization sponsored it. Paul’s speech was an offensive, lying, and racist rewrite of the history of the U.S. and was opposed by many students.
Students challenged his racist re-writing of the history of black workers in the United States. Two students raised a banner declaring “Howard University Doesn’t Support White Supremacy,” correctly labeling Paul for what he is — a racist. The audience erupted in applauses in support of the students’ bold action.
Belying their pretense of academic freedom, the University administrators had the campus police swarm the two students, roughly shoving them out of the auditorium. The students continued to protest outside the building, declaring that capitalism promoted racism, and that neither the Democratic not the Republican Party had anything of value for black students.
The racist Republican Party that the Democratic Party is slicker at winning black and Latino votes in overwhelming numbers (although most potential voters don’t bother to even participate in the bosses’ electoral shell game). Since the share of these groups in the population is growing, Republicans realize that they must figure out a way to appeal to them if they are to remain relevant.
Rand Paul also wants to position himself as the bold new Republican leader willing to take on the task of cutting into Democratic support among black students. This is a tough road, given that for 50 years, Republican leaders have appealed to gutter racists in their campaigns. Richard Nixon launched the famous “Southern Strategy” to get racist white southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republicans. Then, Ronald Reagan used a blatantly racist tale about black welfare Cadillac mothers to help win the election in the 1980s. George H. W. Bush similarly used the Willie Horton racist falsehood in his campaign in the 1990s. And Rand Paul wonders why black people don’t vote Republican, even though it’s the party of Lincoln?
Students and faculty are outraged at this administration-sanctioned racist lecture and repressive action against students.  We should not be surprised, but instead understand that U.S. universities are not wide-open forums for a free flow of ideas. They are corporations controlled by boards made up of bosses and their politicians. Universities encourage curricula that support the status quo and discredit revolutionary alternatives. The Rand Paul event, as absurd as it was, is simply another rightwing effort to keep students tied to the capitalist system, and may well be followed by further efforts to move the university discussion further to the right. The University is an arena of class struggle. It is up to us to wage the ideological and practical battle to expose and defeat racists and capitalists on the campus.