Najam Interviewed on Foreign Policy Impacts of Race Protests
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed on the news show NewsWise on Pakistan’s leading TV channel, DawnTV, where he discussed the continuing protests in the United States following the death of George Floyd, a black man whose neck was pinned to the ground under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. The nationwide protests following the incident are among the most widespread mass demonstrations in recent memory and have now gained international prominence.
In the interview that aired June 8, 2020, Najam was asked to analyze the possible impacts of the incident in the U.S., including on the forthcoming U.S. elections and on U.S. image and foreign policy abroad. Najam described the country’s painful history of racism, beginning with slavery, a civil war, and an unfinished civil rights movement that, according to him, “remains the deepest wound on the American psyche.”
Asked to comment on how such incidents and the protests that follow impact the international image of the U.S., Najam suggested that “the repeated occurrence of such horrendous incidents and the protests that follow, hurt the legitimacy of the U.S. as a champion on international human rights in deep, cumulative and lasting ways.” On the forthcoming elections, he argued that these protests, prior incidents, and the way the Trump administration handled them as well as the overall COVID crisis will certainly be “front and center” in the 2020 U.S. elections. Najam said it is not clear whether these issues will hurt President Trump’s core support base, which still seems to be solidly behind him.
Adil Najam is a global public policy expert who also served as the Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. Among other books, Najam is the author of Pakistanis in America: Portrait of a Giving Community (Harvard University Press, 2006) . More here.