Hajar Yazdiha

Hajar Yazdiha (Col ’05) has published The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement with Princeton University Press.

In the post–civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women’s rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy, fracturing our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next.