A “Letter of Solidarity” from Cal. State University, Northridge reads like a parody of Leftist anti-Americanism
I received in my email a copy of a “letter of solidarity” circulating amongst employees in the Masters of Social Work Department at California State University, Northridge (“CSUN”), a California taxpayer-funded institution that also receives federal tax dollars. In this solidarity letter, department members indict the entire American system for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, as well as for the death and suffering of all other victim classes in America.
This apocalyptic, anti-American mindset begins with the cover letter accompanying the email:
From: Chavez, Naomi [XXXX@XXXX]
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 11:29 AM
To: Chavez, Naomi
Subject: IPT and Letter of SolidarityPlease reply directly to Jose Paez [XXXX@XXXX]
Attached please find the CSUN MSW Department Letter of Solidarity. Our attempt was to adequately capture the feelings of outrage, frustration, humiliation, shame and pain experienced by so many communities for so many generations without access to true justice or healing. Our letter builds from the work of Portland State University, Simmons College, and Smith College; joins the growing number of schools/departments that have made a public statement; and upholds our obligation as social workers to speak out against social injustices.
Our letter uses settler colonialism as a main lens and framework of analysis to interpret the current state of affairs within a historical context. We have addressed the historical traumas and provided evidence/examples of the intersecting oppressive forces which create the space for the persistent forms of state sanctioned violence we see today. We have created a brief yet thorough list of action items to hold us accountable.
If you have a chance, please take a moment to read this letter. We would like to gather and add as many signatures to this letter as possible. We are posting the letter to our Dept. website today–Friday (12/19). We also plan to email this document to President Harrison, as well as to our students. If you’d like your name to be added to this letter, please email José Paez (XXXX@XXXX) directly today (12/19) and he’ll add your name. If you miss the deadline, but would still like to be added, please email José and he’ll make sure you get added to the letter. Please let us know if you have any questions.
José Miguel Paez, LCSW
CSUN MSW Department
18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, Ca. 91330-8226
818 [XXX-XXXX]
XXXX@XXXX
That cant-filled email is just a mild prelude. To fully appreciate how an American university can write in language that, barring 21st century updates for gays and transgenders, almost perfectly replicates anti-American tirades emanating from Moscow during the height of the Cold War, you have to read the actual “Letter of Solidarity” (click on images to enlarge):
Not only does the letter consist entirely of turgid, Marxist academic writing (which sees the authors expressing solidarity with “Victims of interlocking forms of oppression including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism”), it refers to a factual universe unrelated to any reality outside of the fevered halls of academia. For example, I strongly suspect that both Garner and Brown would have been surprised to find themselves lumped in with gays, women, transsexuals, and Hispanic immigrants responsible for taking jobs blacks once held. To their minds — and, no doubt, to the minds of the black communities running riot all over America — there is no comparison between black oppression and any oppression visited on all the other people on that list. That’s especially true for those victims of sex and gender-related “isms.” American blacks are, after all, profoundly homophobic.
After this preliminary throat-clearing about all the victims of this cruel, cruel American world, the letter gets to its main point: It is a sweeping indictment of an irreparably tainted political, social, and legal system that has its origins in white patriarchal colonialism:
We acknowledge that the above-‐mentioned cases illustrate the evolution of our legal institutions to uphold racial, gender, class, and sexual orientation hierarchies. We recognize that our legal system was designed within the context of settler colonialism; that it continues to disempower, segregate, and eradicate specific communities and people, while retaining privilege for white, middle class, heteronormative, Christian families.
To support this scathing ideological charge against America, the letter proceeds to specifics. These specifics sound like facts, but are in fact so twisted and perverted that they have all the reality of a fun-house mirror. I’ve set forth each “fact,” followed by a note about inaccuracies or irrational lines of thinking:
[1] This is evidenced by the epidemics of mass incarceration and deportation [Note: It’s unclear what “epidemics of mass incarcertation” exercise the letter’s signatories. What’s certain is that Obama’s administration has tried to halt deportations despite the fact that it is obligated by law to remove people who are in the country illegally, and that deportation numbers have dropped dramatically.];
[2] the overrepresentation of youth of color and LGBTQ youth within child welfare and juvenile justice systems [Note: This is tragic and true — and no doubt arises from the fact that children of color come disproportionately from single mother homes, with the absence of a father a clear indicator of both child poverty and criminality. LGBTQ youth belong to a demographic that consistently rates higher in drug use and alcoholism (despite record acceptance of homosexuality amongst the peers of gay youth), two activities that often result in imprisoned young people. In other words, the high incarceration rates arise not because the criminal system is cruel but because the social systems in which these young people live are cruel.];
[3] disparate health outcomes and accessibility to healthcare [Note: As just one article from the thousands available on the internet indicates, while it’s tempting to blame a discriminatory system for different health outcomes, the problems of disparate outcomes run deeper, touching upon lifestyle choices (e.g., unprotected sex, cigarette smoking, unhealthy diets due to cultural mores); employment options (e.g., more dangerous construction jobs for young Hispanic men); cultural dependence on non-effective faux-medical options; language barriers; etc.];
[4] Stop and Frisk and other policing tactics used to intimidate and harass [Note: Stop and Frisk, by stopping petty crime before it becomes major crime, has probably saved more minority lives than just about any other program in America. It is a sad truth that those getting stopped and frisked are themselves minorities, but at least they’re not preying on their own community.];
[5] racial and religious profiling at borders and within communities of color [Note: Without digging up citations for this, I can state with some certainty that, at our Southern border, we’re not getting a lot of blonde, blue-eyed Swedish youth trying to cross into this country illegally. Instead, those sneaking across our borders are darker-skinned Hispanics and the occasional fanatical Muslim. In the real world, as opposed to the magical Marxist world, profiling for fair-skinned Christians or Jews would be delusional, not practical.];
[6] murder of transgender people, especially those of color [Note: It appears that transgender people have a horrifically high murder rate, and this is a tragedy. People with insufficiently controlled lizard brains (you know, the primitive part of the brain that behaves atavistically) react very badly to transgender people. I’m not sure how this works as an indictment of the police or even of our government and social systems, given that our government, our social systems, and our police all work to prevent these murders, not encourage them.];
[7] heightened rates of sexual assault and racialized forms of sexual harassment perpetrated against women of color [Note: Contrary to what’s implied in this clause, which lacks a subject noun, black women are not raped by those “white, middle class, heteronormative, Christian” men that the Letter’s signatories hate so much. They are overwhelmingly raped by black men.];
[8] normalization of militarized police forces specifically in the lowest income neighborhoods [Note: I’m not happy with our increasingly militarized police either, since it has the tendency to create in police the mindset that, rather than being the public’s servants, they are its masters. On the other hand, of late police have had good reason to go into some neighborhoods armed for battle]; and
[9] failure to indict police officers who are captured on video killing unarmed persons [Note: This is probably a reference to Garner, a morbidly obese man who was videotaped in a non-fatal headlock, as opposed to a “chokehold,” and who died later because of a heart attack. In other words, facts and hysteria do not match.].
The people who view American through this grim, factually twisted prism are utterly blind to the fact that, in principle since its founding and in practice for much of the 20th century, America has been a country predicated on individual freedom. When those freedoms have been denied, that denial has come about because of too much government control — as in the antebellum and Jim Crow south, for example, both of which represented the foul apex of American state control over individual liberties — not because of too little government control. Individuals can behave stupidly and meanly, but the real problems begin when government takes sides — and government always takes sides because, no matter the action it takes, some will benefit and some will not.
Worse than sad, though, is the fact that this unwholesome, perverse world view is internalized by and emanates from people who have significant control over young minds. After all, the signatories to this document are teachers in CSUN’s Department of Social Work. Whether they teach students who take a casual class to fulfill some sort of requirement or students who are majoring in social work, the department has at some time access to a large percentage of a student body numbering about 38,000 students annually.
Of those 38,000 students, each one who comes through the doors of the Department of Social Work is exposed to this unfiltered anti-American, anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian doctrine. Each student’s grades is dependent upon his or her ability to remember and regurgitate this toxic Leftist ideology. Once credentialed, these students then spread throughout America’s schools and social institutions, carrying this dark, hate-filled, self-victimized vision with them wherever they go. They are carriers of a deadly social worldview, just as surely as Typhoid Mary was a carrier of a deadly disease.