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Black students at Pomona College now claim that objective truth is a tool of white supremacy.
The Daily Caller is reporting about a letter written to the dean of Pomona College. The letter claims that objectivity, truth, and reality are all white constructs meant to oppress minorities. The Daily Caller pointed out that the school these kids go to costs over $64 thousand per year to attend.
The letter also demanded that the school and campus police “take action” against a newspaper called The Claremont Independent. If you’re wondering why, it’s because they’re breaking a ton of stories about SJW antics. First, The Claremont Independent reported on a college in California where a group of Latina students told white women they’re not allowed to wear hoop earrings.
We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges, would like to address several of the points made in your ‘Academic Freedom and Free Speech’ email sent out to the entire student body on April 7, 2017 in response to a student protest against Heather Mac Donald’s talk at Claremont McKenna College’s (CMC) Athenaeum. We believe that given your position as President of this institution your voice holds significant weight in campus discourse. That power comes with immense responsibility, especially when you could dictate campus culture, climate, and the alleged mission of this institution. As President, you are charged with upholding principles of Pomona College. Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves. The paradox is that Pomona’s past is rooted in domination of marginalized peoples and communities and the student body has a significant population of students from these backgrounds. Your recent statement reveals where Pomona’s true intentions lie.
Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry. Thus, if “our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,” how does free speech uphold that value? The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths (coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’) that the institution promotes. Pomona cannot have its cake and eat it, too. Either you support students of marginalized identities, particularly Black students, or leave us to protect and organize for our communities without the impositions of your patronization, without your binary respectability politics, and without your monolithic perceptions of protest and organizing. In addition, non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.
Your statement contains unnuanced views surrounding the academy and a belief in searching for some venerated truth. Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth--’the Truth’--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples. We, Black students, exist with a myriad of different identities. We are queer, trans, differently-abled, poor/low-income, undocumented, Muslim, first-generation and/or immigrant, and positioned in different spaces across Africa and the African diaspora. The idea that we must subject ourselves routinely to the hate speech of fascists who want for us not to exist plays on the same Eurocentric constructs that believed Black people to be impervious to pain and apathetic to the brutal and violent conditions of white supremacy.
The idea that the search for this truth involves entertaining Heather Mac Donald’s hate speech is illogical. If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist. Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live. Why are you, and other persons in positions of power at these institutions, protecting a fascist and her hate speech and not students that are directly affected by her presence?
Advocating for white supremacy and giving white supremacists platforms wherefrom their toxic and deadly illogic may be disseminated is condoning violence against Black people. Heather Mac Donald does not have the right to an audience at the Athenaeum, a private venue wherefrom she received compensation. Dictating and condemning non-respectable forms of protest while parroting the phrase that “protest has a celebrated” place on campus is contradictory at best and anti-Black at worst.
This is not an argument rooted in Heather’s loss of “free speech” or academic freedom. She is a well-known public figure, her views are well documented. Rather, our praxis is focused on not allowing her anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which she does not have the right to. Engaging with her, a white supremacist fascist supporter of the police state, is a form of violence.
Protest that doesn’t disrupt the status quo is benign and doesn’t function to overthrow systems of oppression, which is the ultimate goal.
To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07pm (since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives). Also, we demand a revised email sent to the entire student body, faculty, and staff by Thursday, April 20, 2017, apologizing for the previous patronizing statement, enforcing that Pomona College does not tolerate hate speech and speech that projects violence onto the bodies of its marginalized students and oppressed peoples, especially Black students who straddle the intersection of marginalized identities, and explaining the steps the institution will take and the resources it will allocate to protect the aforementioned students.
We also demand that Pomona College and the Claremont University Consortium entities take action against the Claremont Independent editorial staff (Meet the Staff | The Claremont Independent) for its continual perpetuation of hate speech, anti-Blackness, and intimidation toward students of marginalized backgrounds. Provided that the Claremont Independent releases the identity of students involved with this letter and such students begin to receive threats and hate mail, we demand that this institution and its constituents take legal action against members of the Claremont Independent involved with the editing and publication process as well as disciplinary action, such as expulsion on the grounds of endangering the wellbeing of others.
To be fair, props are due for the use of the phrase "Rather, our praxis is focused on..." within a line of reasoning which is otherwise so tortured as to escape the bounds of any meaningful interpretation of the word "credibility."
(Although, personally, I would have written "Rather, our praxis is focused upon...", as it seems to enhance the gravitas of the mission-statement.)
And doesn't "We, few of the Black students here at blababla, would like to address......." mean that only a few of the black students at the college take exception with the email sent? Wouldn't it be "We few of the blablabla..." or "We the blablabla....".
It's been a long time since my last grammar lesson and I always sucked at using commas anyway. Regardless of, and punctuation aside, The. End. Is. Near.
Facebook could be particularly hard-hit by any changes the Trump administration makes to H-1B visa policies. More than 15 percent of its employees used temporary work visas last year — a higher percentage than at Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Labor Department filings.
Does anyone else find it weird that an American company is paying its immigrant workers to protest for jobs that they are taking away from Americans? What's wrong with hiring American workers? Or are Americans going to college to become protesters nowadays and therefore they have no value to these American companies?
Does anyone else find it weird that an American company is paying its immigrant workers to protest for jobs that they are taking away from Americans? What's wrong with hiring American workers? Or are Americans going to college to become protesters nowadays and therefore they have no value to these American companies?
Anyone with a CS degree or related certifications is not having an issue finding a job right now. The reason these companies have so many H1B employees is because supply is dwarfed by current demand. It's why CS grads are getting healthy six figure offers with stock options straight out of school. I also don't see the issue with hiring people who have mostly been educated here and are looking for a job. I would rather not educate a bunch of immigrants and then just send them home because they are not native. They can contribute to our economy and pay taxes to our government or we can allow a brain drain from our universities so we can protect "American" jobs that don't actually need protection.
I really don't get the "antifa" thing. I mean, they're supposedly opposed to facism, I get that. But who are the fascists which they are opposing?
So far as I can tell, these self-described groups engage in two basic categories of public activism:
1: Committing violence with the aim of causing a breakdown in social order, the inevitable consequence of which will be an increase in police action / the imposition of a police state / marshal law, and,
2: Championing for the administrative nullification of the First Amendment.
It’s not unusual for folks in the Centennial State to witness snow in April if the snowflakes are outside. But on this occasion, they appeared inside a university classroom, which, it turns out, is not unusual either.
Having been invited by the local chapter of the student organization, Turning Point USA, I arrived on the campus of the University of Colorado-Denver to deliver a lecture on “Lessons from Ancient Rome.” The subject was 2,500-year-old history with a sprinkling of observations about what we today might learn from it all. Not exactly a hot-button topic such as abortion, immigration, Trump, or the most recent season of The Walking Dead.
What I saw from a minority of radicalized students in the audience, however, was an appalling microcosm of the smug, arrogant, self-righteous, politically-correct, campus insanity that you see on TV with increasing frequency these days.
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About a dozen of the students at last Thursday’s event interrupted my lecture repeatedly with lengthy diatribes. One held up a sign that read, “Bullshit!” They heckled me. When that failed, they accused me of racism. I was able to deal with the interruptions and conclude my speech, but that was due to a failure in the protesters’ organizing capabilities rather than any generosity in their intent. They exhibited far more “selfishness” than the conservatives and libertarians they think of as “selfish” and seek to silence. It certainly helped that the rest of the audience wanted me to speak, and enthusiastically applauded each time I put a protester in his place.
For me, next year will mark 50 years in the “liberty movement.” It was in 1968, a month shy of my 15th birthday and prompted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, that I participated in a public demonstration in Pittsburgh. So I know and appreciate the importance of protest. In the right places and at the proper times and for noble causes, it’s a healthy and necessary thing. In Mellon Square in downtown Pittsburgh that day forty-nine years ago, we protested the vicious deployment of tanks, guns and troops by a communist regime to crush the rights and freedoms of a neighboring country.
What the hooligans last Thursday at my lecture in Colorado were objecting to was a very different kind of invasion—a peaceful, voluntary offering of ideas they were unaware of, didn’t want to hear, and thought it was their right to prevent others from hearing. Their intent was to intimidate, to harass, to silence, to dominate. This is not conduct that a citadel of education should tolerate for an instant.
Interesting, isn’t it, that what some go to college for, others find “offensive.” As I watched the incident occur, I thought to myself, “I’m standing in a taxpayer-funded institution of supposedly ‘higher’ education, not a Khmer Rouge re-education camp, for crying out loud!”
The disruptions commenced a mere five minutes into my lecture on Roman history, before I had progressed much beyond about 300 B.C. So it was hardly anything I could have said that the disrupters truly found indecent. They had come voluntarily but were annoyed—deeply and personally aggrieved, it seemed—for no more reason than the speaker and the sponsoring organization possessed viewpoints they knew little about, didn’t understand, couldn’t articulate, and don’t like.
Far-left students derailing speakers with whom they disagree have been in the news a lot. Sometimes they’ve resorted to violence. Many times, the speech being protested was canceled before it happened or protesters forcibly prevented the speaker from finishing his job. My encounter was small potatoes by comparison and fortunately, never descended into fisticuffs. And I did push back, and I did finish speaking.
When I taught college classes 40 years ago, I didn’t tolerate a sleeper or a ball cap, let alone a bad-mannered brat with no respect for the rights of his fellow students. So I wasn’t about to let these “progressive” brownshirts shut me up.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald explained where this tawdry deportment is coming from:
Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech…The silencing of speech is a massive problem, but it is a symptom of an even more profound distortion of reality.
Like Mac Donald, I doubt that many of the anti-free speech bullies in today’s colleges and universities enter those institutions with the intent to shut people up. It’s not typically their parents who teach them intolerance, it’s a handful of their professors—the very professors their parents are bankrolling with their hard-earned tax and tuition dollars. They are besmirching the entire profession, which neither the serious students who want to learn or the good professors who want to teach deserve.
My FEE colleague Jeffrey Tucker recently shed light on the influence of Herbert Marcuse, a key Marxist intellectual from whom the troublemakers draw inspiration. In a similar vein, I wrote four years ago about how ugly ideas permeating British academia contributed to ugly behavior in the streets in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013.
Here are some highlights of the exchange at the University of Colorado-Denver last week:
A few minutes into my lecture, a student raised his hand and started speaking. I politely said, “Please let me get through my lecture and then we’ll have a Q & A period.” He muttered something that only those around him could hear, but I doubt it was “Thank you.”
A minute or two later, I mentioned that ancient Roman road-building was so massive that nothing would compare in magnitude until the 20th Century. One of the snowflakes found that offensive.
“Not true! The Mayans built roads too!” that same student rudely interjected from the back of the room.
“Yes, the Mayans built roads too, but nothing on the scale of the Romans,” I responded.
“Not true!” he insisted. “We have professors who have researched this!”
Well, here are the cold, hard facts: Roman road mileage totaled 250,000. By contrast, the most extensive road system in pre-Columbian South America was constructed by the Incas, not the Mayans, and it amounted to a mere 25,000 miles. Mayan civilization (everything, not just the roads) covered about 125,000 square miles at its height, compared to Rome’s 2.5 million square miles. You could fit all of the Mayan Empire into just half of the Roman province of Egypt. So the student who felt so put upon and so sure of himself that he had to interrupt the speaker didn’t actually have a clue of what he was babbling about.
There’s another point worth making here. Why do you suppose the student was so indignant that I didn’t give inflated road-building credit to the Mayans in a lecture on Rome? Answer: Because Romans were white Europeans and in the official Newspeak of far-Left academia, white Europeans are barely a notch above persona non grata. Mayans, on the other hand, were “indigenous, native peoples” who must be elevated and celebrated.
Never mind that the state religion of the Mayan Empire incorporated idol worship, human sacrifice, hallucinogenic rituals and decapitations. Let’s not talk about the pandemic internecine warfare of the Mayan Empire, or its severe environmental degradation and enslavement of subjugated peoples, either. That would not be politically correct.
Again, I asked that I be allowed to make my presentation and take questions afterwards. Mumblings and a few brief outbursts persisted but I mostly ignored them.
Fifteen or so minutes later, another student raised his voice from the back row, “You haven’t allowed any questions yet!”
I replied, “I already said I would take questions when the lecture is over, and I promise I’ll call on you first.” He insisted on speaking then and there, whereupon one of the Turning Point students asked him to leave the room. He did, but returned moments later.
In the video clip above, you can observe a part of this student’s Second Coming. As promised, I called on him during the Q & A. Do you suppose his question was about Roman history? Of course not. Here, slightly abbreviated, is how it unfolded:
Student: “You wouldn’t take my question when I wanted to ask it. Why should I listen to anything you say if you won’t listen to what I say? Why should I bother?”
Me: “What am I doing right now but listening to you?” A few incoherent mumblings in response, which prompted me to then assert, “This has happened before on some campuses and I’m guessing that you just can’t stand the fact that somebody might have a viewpoint different from yours.” Vigorous applause followed from the great majority of the audience, boos and catcalls from the minority.
The video clip, unfortunately, doesn’t quite capture a subsequent moment that I regard as the high point of the whole affair. I raised my voice to convey an important observation to the disrupter: “You have a character problem!” I doubt he understood that I was informing him that his rude intolerance was not only indefensible, it was a manifestation of something wrong inside, something flawed about his personal choices and conduct.
“Now you’re calling me an idiot!” he exclaimed, to which I instantly shot back, “I did NOT say you were an idiot. I said you have a character problem!”
That’s when some shouting and epithets began to pour forth from the know-it-all snowflakes: “You’re a racist! “Bullshit!” ****!” And a few F-bombs as well, the first of several aimed at me both during the event and while I was walking to my car. It was amazing how swiftly and seamlessly these wise guys toggled between “offended“ and “offensive”!
And oh, the sanctimony was so thick you could cut it with a knife! The slogans that rolled off those immature tongues were what Anthony Esolen refers to in his superb book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture as “cant”—the insincere or hypocritical use of pious language to cover up for one’s ignorance while making a pretense to moral superiority. In Esolen’s words,
You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer…
People are especially prone to cant when they describe their feelings in public. When someone says, “I am offended by that remark,” the first thing you must think, in our time, is that the remark has broken upon the person’s day like the bright sun through a week of rain and gloom. An owl is not offended by the little field mouse; it is just what the owl is on the lookout for. If the offended person loses any sleep that night, it will not be for sorrow, but for delightful dreams of vengeance and public displays of virtue. The cannibal rolls up his sleeves and whets the knife. For truly tolerant people are hard to offend. They do not seek occasion to bring others into ill repute. They do not put the worst construction on someone else’s words or deeds.
Disturbingly, this lowering of the most basic standards of interpersonal communication makes a mockery of “higher” education in this troubled age of ours.
Blake Scott from Littleton, Colorado was there last Thursday evening (and provided the video clip). In his words, “I was shocked at how the students attacked Mr. Reed with unwarranted claims. Rather than derailing from his speech that he was invited to give, he respectfully took the moral high ground. Hecklers accused him of racism during the question and answer session, claiming he selectively picked students for questions by racial profile, without any evidence whatever. The students constantly attempted to disrupt the speech but he calmly rebutted their outbursts.”
Bradley Beck of Erie, Colorado, another eyewitness, says, “The whole time, Mr. Reed smiled and stayed professional, calm and in charge.”
So the good news is that this time, the bad guys didn’t get away with it.
The increasing frenzy of the campus Left may be an indication that, in the words of Robert Tracinski in The Federalist, we are approaching “peak leftism.” We should certainly hope Tracinski is right.
Writing in The Washington Post on April 20 (the same day as my Colorado speech, coincidentally), Catherine Rampell advised, “Don’t blame college students for their hostility to free expression. The fault ultimately lies with cowardly school administrations, who so often cave to student demands for censorship.” (In that same article, she recounted a crazy episode at American University in Washington. It’s worth your attention. Also, check out the headlines to commentary at The College Fix and you’ll get the drift.)
Rampell makes a good point. Cowardly school administrators are indeed partly at fault, and not just because they coddle reprehensible student conduct. When they hire barbarians to teach in their classrooms and collaborate with them to blackball serious scholars of a different viewpoint, they are accomplices in the degradation of education and the decay of civilization.
But I don’t let the students off the hook. They are young adults. Even if they act like toddlers in a temper tantrum, nothing will nip this stuff in the bud quicker than treating them as adults. That means one fair warning before a second offense. Then you get expelled and perhaps fined and maybe even a night or two in the slammer, if I had my druthers. Unlike the barbarian Left, I take freedom of speech seriously, and assaults on it even more seriously. Let’s stand up to these bullies. Civilization depends on it.
The students from the UC-Denver Turning Point chapter suffer through intimidation tactics from the campus Left all the time, as do courageous students from TPUSA chapters elsewhere, along with students in similar organizations like Young Americans for Liberty, Students for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. At FEE, we are proud to work with them, provide literature and speakers and moral support, and we applaud their efforts to resist the barbarians in their midst. If anything, the incident last week only emboldens us to assist them all the more.
God damn, I would love to be a college student today... I hate to sound all "back in my day...", but we really did have it way too easy. The Cold War had just ended, the War on Reason hadn't yet begun, and we really just had nothing of consequence to get riled up about.
04-19-2017, 02:19 PM
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