I am presenting today and tomorrow at the twenty-second Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference. It is being held at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC, and the theme of the conference is “Legal and Political Change During the Obama Era.”
Today at 2:00 PM, I commented on a work-in-progress by Professor Khaled Beyhoun of the University of Detroit-Mercy School of Law. His work is entitled “Acting Muslim.” Professor Beyhoun already has a tremendous national and international profile as an expert commentator on Islamophobia, critical theory, and religious freedom. His work in progress promises to be a substantial contribution to the literature on the intersectional nature of racialized religious discrimination, and an important intellectual and litigation tool in the post-Obama era.
Tomorrow at 3:15 PM, I will be speaking on the fourth and final plenary panel of the conference, “Election 2016: Revelation sand Responses.” I will address what has become an extremely timely topic, “Voter Fraud as Nemesis: Fragility, Distortion, and the 2016 Election.” In this talk, I will discuss the President’s ongoing propaganda campaign asserting the existence of voter fraud by “illegal” voters (notwithstanding any evidence to support his claims) and its interrelationship with the identity politics of post-racialism. This, read through the larger dynamic of voter suppression illustrated by recent voter identification cases like NAACP v. McCrory and Veasey v. Abbott, illustrates a new era of racialized and class-focused political domination. Like others who have commented on Trump’s motives and the endgame of these voter fraud claims, e.g., Professor Erika Wilson’s commentary in yesterday’s Washington Post, I will draw out how this narrative serves to enable voter suppression. However, unlike other recent commentators, I will frame this discussion through the lens of meme theory (an approach I developed in my paper, The Meme of Voter Fraud), to further develop an account of the intersectional nature of this deployment of the voter fraud meme in the post-Shelby County era of voting rights recalibration.
Atiba Ellis 