Over the past week, President Trump repeatedly weaponized the office of the presidency to attack four sitting congresswomen — all of whom are women of color — with violent and exceedingly undemocratic rhetoric. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), known as “the Squad,” have responded to Trump’s unrelenting and violent onslaught with assertive civility, never hesitating to defend themselves but refusing to take the bait.

After calling for all four members of the Squad to “go back” to where they came from last weekend (all but Omar, a Somali refugee, were born in America), Trump’s disgraceful attacks reached their nadir Wednesday night in North Carolina when he whipped a crowd of supporters into a hateful frenzy, eventually leading to a collective, 13-second chanting of “Send her back!” This was a direct attack on Omar, one of the first two Muslim American women elected to Congress. It was also an ugly attempt to portray immigrants of color as disposable and deportable for the high crime of expressing dissent with the current administration.

To be clear, telling a black woman to “go back” to Africa is not a dog whistle. It is a blatant instance of anti-black racism rooted in white supremacist claims to this country and a dominant culture that has long engaged in the routine denigration and exploitation of African people. While Trump certainly treats his white critics with gross incivility and rhetorical violence, he never tells them to “go back” to where they came from, undoubtedly due to the racist assertion that whites and whites alone should retain ownership over this land.

Suggesting that women of color — and elected officials — do not belong in their own country is entirely consistent with a worldview that finds it acceptable to encourage the assassination of the African American and Latino boys of Central Park 5, the physical assault of protesters of color exercising their First Amendment rights, and the incarceration of political enemies, like when Trump led a similar chant for Hillary Clinton with “Lock her up.” Trump’s nightmarish vision of America has always been grounded in a politics of crude violence and unapologetic hatred.

But instead of stooping to the president’s level after footage of the “Send her back” chants spread on social media last week, Omar simply tweeted a stanza from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise”: “You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes / You may kill me with your hatefulness / But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Ocasio-Cortez also took the high road after Trump’s pointed attack on her colleague, refusing to address him by name but telling a crowd in Maryland on Thursday morning, “It has taken us 240 years to have this unique composite in the Congress, in this moment, and we will not go back.” At a press conference earlier in the week, the Squad stood before the media and maintained their resolve, calmly denouncing Trump’s dangerous rhetoric while presenting a composed and professional contrast to the president’s infantile bullying.

The emotional labor of rising above childish, immoral, and degrading attacks is routinely imposed on women of color, lest they risk further distraction from their message, which is continually dismissed by opponents eager to paint these women as “aggressive” or “uncivil.” Like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), whom Trump has called “unhinged,” and other women of color who maintain their civility in the face of hostility, members of the Squad are subject to double standards that enable men (especially white men) to openly express anger, frustration, and aggression in public and private spheres while depriving women (especially women of color) from the right to legitimately express the full range of human emotions.

To wit, Trump routinely engages in public fits of rage, encourages physical violence against critics, and turns reality on its head by smearing his targets as “angry” and dangerous. Meanwhile, conservative and far-right media, not to mention Trump himself, falsely portray the Squad as hateful and threatening. Such rampant misrepresentation of reality and psychological manipulation has a name: gaslighting.  

As I’ve argued in my book How to Be Less Stupid About Race, white supremacist racism validates expressions of rage and violence on the part of whites, especially white men, while depicting racial “others” as menacing threats. White men (themselves the product of immigration and colonization) are traditionally allowed to engage in virulent critique of the United States, encourage violent rebellion, and even launch a civil war — without being told, as a matter of course, to “love it or leave it.”

In this way, the dynamics of white supremacy frame people of color as always already illegitimate citizens, insufficiently patriotic and unworthy of civic engagement. We saw this on display when Trump praised white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” and again last week when he described the “go back” chanters as “people that love our country.”

As advocates for human rights and progressive change, the Squad members join a long line of people of color, civil rights leaders, and white allies who have been subject to vicious smears, death threats, and acts of intimidation designed to silence their voices and maintain the white male supremacist status quo. The intertwined forces of racism and sexism have historically socialized Americans to disregard the critical insights of women of color. From Ida B. Wells to Ella Baker, black women in particular have had to struggle against incivility, disrespect, and grotesque forms of violence. Today, when women of color speak up to oppose oppression and injustice, they are still undermined with pathologizing stereotypes like the “angry black woman” trope.

For her part, Omar remains unbowed and undeterred. “We are Americans as much as everyone else,” she said in a later response to Trump’s vile attacks. “This is our country and we are where we belong. And I told people on my election night, in the great state of Minnesota — we don’t just welcome refugees, we send them to represent us in Washington.”

Crystal Marie Fleming, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology and associate faculty in the departments of Africana Studies and women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of two books, including How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide and Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France. Find her on Twitter @alwaystheself.

“Congratulations to Maxine Waters, whose crazy rants have made her, together with Nancy Pelosi, the unhinged FACE of the Democrat Party,” tweeted Trump yesterday. “Together, they will Make America Weak Again!”

This was Trump’s response to remarks the Congress member made about the president’s family separation policy at a rally last Saturday:

“Already, you have members of your Cabinet that have been booed out of restaurants, who have protesters taking up at their house who sang, ‘No peace, no sleep.’ … And guess what, we’re going to win this battle. … Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome.”

Right-wing pundits have accused Waters of instigating violence and called for her formal censure. Rep. Anthony Biggs of Arizona insists that she resign and issue a public apology to White House officials for “endangering their lives and sowing seeds of discord.” Even some Democrats directly or indirectly criticized their colleague. House minority leader Chuck Schumer said that Waters’s words were “not American” and Nancy Pelosi suggested that “we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.” Waters has already canceled two speaking events due to threats.

Republicans’ efforts to demonize Waters and mischaracterize her statement as a form of violence are not surprising. These are blatant attempts to divert attention from the administration’s persecution of migrant families. Republicans have been exploiting the episode to raise campaign donations over the last week. But why did high-profile Democrats decide that civility is a more pressing matter than speaking up against the traumatic and possibly irreparable separation of children from their parents?

Depicting a 79-year-old black Congress member as a threatening figure is also a way of delegitimizing her with the “angry black woman” trope. These efforts to police and sanction Waters for boldly challenging the most overtly white nationalist administration since the civil rights movement illustrate the peculiar intersections of racism and sexism for black women in the United States.

Unlike Rep. Waters, who has a long history of opposing violence, including her opposition to the Iraq War, Donald Trump and his supporters have a long and ignominious history of explicitly encouraging violence. We have a sitting president who trivializes the prospects of nuclear war, issues direct and veiled threats to world leaders and political opponents alike, and then plays the victim card while attempting to demonize and intimidate critics like Maxine Waters.

But in our racist and sexist society, a white man like Donald Trump can openly incite and even celebrate physical violence and be rewarded with the presidency, while a black representative is subject to calumny, slurs, and even death threats for promoting non-violent protest.

To be clear, Waters called for opponents of the administration’s cruel and unjust child separation policy to push back on Cabinet officials — with words. Contrary to Republicans’ absurd accusations, she did not advocate physical assault of Trump supporters.

Turning reality on its head to suggest that a champion of non-violent protest is actually a clear and present danger is a form of gaslighting, an abuse tactic used by the powerful to manipulate those they wish to silence or dominate. I and many others who speak up against and challenge oppression know exactly how it feels to be attacked as “divisive” for acknowledging the social and political divisions that are already present in our society.

There is nothing new about white Americans portraying anti-racists as violent. Slandering black activists and human rights advocates as menacing threats allows those who wish to defend the status quo to play the victim. Research on white racial attitudes and collective memory shows that white Southerners who lived through the civil rights movement viewed themselves, not people of color, as victimized.

Moreover, Black activists have traditionally been subject to respectability politics, or the attempt to prove their moral upstanding and worth through a respectable presentation of self. But choosing their words and even their clothes carefully never protected black activists from being viewed as a menace to (white) society.

Ida B. Wells, the iconic black feminist and anti-lynching crusader, was threatened and attacked by white racists and even some fellow African Americans for her human rights advocacy and provocative language. Detractors accused peace-loving Martin Luther King Jr. himself of inciting hatred and violence. More recently, national anthem protests led by Colin Kaepernick and other athletes have been framed by critics as divisive and unpatriotic. Stigmatizing black protest in this way deflects attention from the pressing civil rights and social justice issues at hand.

Public demonstrations are an appropriate and, one might argue, exceedingly civil response to state-sponsored child abuse, human rights violations, and torture. When an administration openly advocates discrimination and harm targeting a wide variety of vulnerable populations — from undocumented migrants to African Americans, to poor or LGBTQ individuals — refusing to serve those officials is a legally protected act of moral courage and conscientious objection. People on the wrong side of history frequently chide human rights advocates as being “uncivil” for speaking out against grotesque forms of violence.

In recent weeks, political protest, investigative journalism, and organizing around migrants’ rights have been highly effective in raising consciousness and building a moral consensus against child separation. Unbowed and unapologetic, Waters threatens the racial and gendered status quo precisely because she highlights this administration’s extreme and heartless brutality.

By now, it should be obvious to people of conscience that children’s lives and well-being matter considerably more than civility and politesse.

Crystal Marie Fleming, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of the forthcoming book How to Be Less Stupid about Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide, coming in September from Beacon Press. Find her on Twitter @alwaystheself.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

There is nothing quite as “Harvard” as Harvard throwing minority women under the bus.

This fall, a history scholar named Michelle Jones will begin her doctoral work at New York University. Earlier this year, she was rejected from Harvard — after being initially accepted. While there are plenty of academics who could relate to Jones’s exclusion from one of the most elite universities in the world, a closer look beneath the surface reveals the politics that shape the kinds of people who are typically “selected” — and those, like Jones, who are kept out.

The future Dr. Jones has already distinguished herself as one of the most sought-after graduate students in the country. But unlike many of her peers with elite pedigrees who come from generations of unacknowledged privilege, Jones was forced to overcome unfathomable odds in her quest to enter the overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class world of academia.

Having served 20 years in prison for killing her child, Jones managed to not only survive psychological trauma, sexual violence, physical abuse, poverty, racism, sexism and two decades of incarceration but also obtained a bachelor’s degree, became a certified paralegal, conducted historical research, and produced award-winning scholarship — all from behind bars. Her stellar application included letters of recommendation from internationally known luminaries, including a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Intent on obtaining a doctorate, Jones applied to Harvard and was voted in by the university’s history department. But colleagues in the department of American studies convinced the university’s leadership to reverse Jones’s admission and exclude her from the incoming class of PhD students.

“We didn’t have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle,” John Stauffer, a Harvard American studies professor, told the New York Times, which published Jones’s story last week. “But frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c’mon.”

The response is shocking and repulsive. But as a scholar of racial oppression, an African-American Harvard alumna, and a past president of the Graduate Student Council at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, I’m unsurprised that regressive forces within and outside of the university attempted to sabotage the career of a black woman scholar. Time and time again, Harvard — despite a superficial commitment to diversity — chooses to turn its back on the most vulnerable groups in our society.

Michelle Jones’s story reveals entrenched racism, sexism, and classism among Harvard elites

Jones’s story reveals entrenched racism, sexism, and classism among Harvard and other elite universities. But of course, this ongoing history is not the image that Harvard conveys to prospective students. As an alumna, it is clear to me that until Harvard’s complicity with multiple systems of domination is plainly confronted, the presence of a few minorities will continue to obscure the systemic and everyday practices that ultimately excluded Michelle Jones — and maintain the status quo.

Although I was not initially knowledgeable about Harvard’s long tradition of protecting white supremacy and sexism when I was admitted to the university’s PhD program in sociology, I certainly began to realize something was amiss as I observed and encountered the university’s subtle and overt stigmatization and disadvantaging of women and racialized minorities.

In my very first year as a PhD student, Larry Summers, then president of the university, made headlines for suggesting that women’s underrepresentation in the sciences results mainly from innate biological differences — not discrimination. While Summers was eventually forced to step down from his presidential post, the fact that he was hired as the university president in the first place suggests just how rampant such ideas are within academia. Summers was, in turn, enthusiastically hired by Barack Obama’s White House, showing how little overt sexism deters from elite white men’s professional success.

I was trained as a graduate student at Harvard to focus on inequality “out there” in the social world — not within the functioning of Harvard’s own institutional practices. Through historical research, reflections on my own conflicted experience, and extensive discussions with other minority scholars, I would eventually come to learn of Harvard’s long and ongoing history of protecting the racial and class order. It is no wonder that the brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African-American to earn a PhD at Harvard, bitterly and correctly concluded that he was “in Harvard, but not of it.”

As I worked alongside some of the world’s leading scholars of racism, I began to detect its subtle functioning within the very same institution where I was earning my degree. From microaggressions in the classroom to the compulsive centering of theoretical work by white men, it became evident to me that institutional racism and sexism were features of my own educational environment.

According to the New York Times/Marshall Project profile of Jones, Harvard’s “president, provost, and deans of the graduate school” — a coterie of white and Asian academics — all decided to take the highly unusual step of reversing Jones’s admission due to “concern that her background would cause a backlash among rejected applicants, conservative news outlets or parents of students.” Some feared that Jones would not be able to handle the “pressure-cooker atmosphere” of the campus.

Stauffer, one of the American studies scholars who worked diligently to overturn Jones’s admission — an expert on “anti-slavery movements” — put it this way: “One of our considerations … was if this candidate is admitted to Harvard, where everyone is an elite among elites, that adjustment could be too much.”

We are to believe that two decades of incarceration and a lifetime of overcoming trauma, sexism, racism, and abuse are nothing compared to Harvard’s “pressure cooker” atmosphere, where “everyone is elite.” Meanwhile, many of these same elites coast on second, third, and fourth chances through generations of privilege that exclude minorities just like Jones.

But beyond the dubious motivations of the scholars and administrators who worked to exclude Jones, I wish to underscore the lead that the New York Times somehow managed to bury: Harvard’s centuries-long complicity with systemic and institutional racism, sexism, and classism.

This kind of action defines Harvard at its core

As a Harvard-trained student of racism, I have had to confront, with horror, the school’s commitment to maintaining the racial, gender, and class order, even as it increasingly cloaks it under a banner of neoliberal diversity and inclusion.

In 2012, nearly half of Harvard undergraduates were drawn from families “in the top 3.8% of All American households.” And, aside from its steady and unfair stream of legacy admissions that privilege the already privileged, Harvard continually forgives itself for profiting from and justifying crimes against humanity such as slavery, eugenics, and imperial violence — crimes that the university has never and will never pay for.

To take just one example of Harvard’s horrors, consider the fact that Charles William Eliot — president of the university in the late 1800s — played a major role in legitimating eugenics, an ideology first developed by white male scientists for the purpose of promoting the genetic erasure of groups deemed to be inferior. Harvard has, in fact, been described as the “brain trust” of the eugenics movement.

The idea that certain human groups are undesirable and should be removed from the face of the planet would later find favor with Hitler, who drew on eugenics to justify the extermination of millions of Jews and other stigmatized people. To this day, there is still a student dorm named for Charles Eliot. And worse — he is not the only white supremacist currently honored and commemorated at Harvard. The same could be said about many campuses across the country.

The contrast in the scale of the crimes involved here is staggering. By institutionalizing and promoting racism and sexism, Harvard has, directly and indirectly, harmed millions by justifying the enslavement, torture, murder, and exclusion of groups deemed “unworthy” and “subordinate.” Yet forces at Harvard found it impossible to forgive an individual incarcerated black woman for a crime she actually paid for — out of fear of white, racist backlash.

And then there’s another unacknowledged dimension of this travesty: the intersectional positionality of university president Drew Faust — a wealthy white woman at the helm of a university that already advantages wealthy whites. There is a harrowing parallel between Faust’s decision to cater to the protective rage of elite racists and conservatives and the fact that 53 percent of white women voted in the presidential election for a racist who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists globally.

Faust, a specialist of the Civil War, famously joined calls for Harvard to confront its ties to slavery. But somehow, the university she helms couldn’t bear admitting Michelle Jones. If Faust could not deign to admit a highly qualified black woman who already paid her debt to society in 2017, would she have had the moral courage to stand up against slavery in the era she studies as a historian?

Perhaps the most terrible irony of this ordeal is the fact that if any university could afford to absorb and combat a backlash against one black woman’s admission, it’s undoubtedly Harvard. The richest university in the world, with a massive $37 billion endowment, Harvard could obviously handle racist pushback if it had the political will to do so. Yet rather than using their unparalleled economic, political, and cultural capital to take a stand, university officials actively chose to protect white supremacist elitism.

Michelle Jones’s experience of marginalization unveils the tenuous predicament of minority students who make their way (or don’t) into the elite world of academia. And hers is just one saga. It is no coincidence that two major stories illustrating Harvard’s exclusion of minority women made international news within the same week.

Just as news of Jones’s story made headlines, we learned that Chelsea Manning’s semester-long invitation to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government was rescinded. Manning, whose visiting fellowship would have examined the military’s treatment of LGBTQ individuals, was disinvited from the university following the public temper tantrums of multiple CIA directors and officials. That includes CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who, in a flurry of apparent outrage, resigned from the Kennedy School’s fellows program to protest Manning’s invitation. Somehow, Harvard finds it impossible to welcome Jones and Manning, even as the university honors President Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer, a current Harvard fellow, as well as CIA officials, like Henry Kissinger, who are quite literally responsible for war crimes.

As Harvard bows to pressure from the CIA to silence and stigmatize Chelsea Manning, one wonders: Where are those conservative “free speech” warriors who, like the president, have ardently defended white supremacists and Nazis?

These twin stories of women’s exclusion from Harvard matter because of the university’s unparalleled influence not only within academia, but within the broader social and political landscape. They also underscore how minorities — including women and nonwhites — can actively participate in the exclusion of other minorities. Taken together, the Jones and Manning cases highlight the marginal status of progressive politics at Harvard, where certain decisions and policies challenging the status quo are allowed, just as many others are aborted, overturned, and overruled — usually behind closed doors.

While initial efforts to welcome Michelle Jones and Chelsea Manning illustrate Harvard’s ideological diversity, the bottom line is that all too often, regressive forces win.

Crystal Marie Fleming, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press). Her next book, How to Be Less Stupid About Race, will be published in 2018. Find her on Twitter @alwaystheself.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.