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Davis, Angela UCSC

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mma 12 23

On Fox’s The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld said, “This is just another example of how the White House just plays to the optics of wokeness and they don't do any research.” Gutfeld added: “This dance troupe is a Marxist organization … they came out in support of defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and they quote Marxist terrorist Angela Davis. They have an entire section on the website devoted to anti-white literature like why white feminists are racists. They want to defund the NYPD and get them out of public schools. I don't think Jill Biden did her research.” Fox News, *The Five*, [12/14/23]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.[4]

As a result of purchasing firearms used in the 1970 armed take-over of a Marin County, California courtroom, in which four persons were killed, she was prosecuted for conspiracy. She was later acquitted of this charge.[5]

She was a professor (now retired) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in its History of Consciousness Department and a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department.[6] Her research interests are feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. She co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex.

Davis's membership in the CPUSA led California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969 to attempt to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She supported the governments of the Soviet Bloc for several decades. During the 1980s, she was twice a candidate for Vice President on the CPUSA ticket, but in 1991 left the party.[7]

Early life

Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family lived in the "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses of middle-class blacks who had moved into the area, in an attempt to intimidate them and drive them out. Davis occasionally spent time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City.[8] Her family included brothers Ben and Reginald and sister Fania. Ben played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[9]

Davis attended Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school; later she attended Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. During this time Davis' mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party. It was trying to build alliances among African Americans in the South. Consequently, Davis grew up surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers who significantly influenced her intellectual development.[10]

Davis was involved in her church as a child; she was an active member in her church youth group and attended Sunday school regularly. Davis attributes much of her political involvement to her involvement as a young girl in Birmingham with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She earned many badges and certificates; she also participated in Girl Scouts 1959 national roundup in Colorado. As a Girl Scout she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham.[11]

By her junior year in high school, Davis had applied to and was accepted at an American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village. There she was introduced to socialism and communism, and recruited by a Communist youth group, Advance.[12]

Education

Brandeis University

Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her freshman class. She initially felt alienated by the isolation of the campus, but she soon made friends with foreign students. She encountered the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became his student. In a 2007 television interview, she said, "Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary."[13] She worked part-time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland before she attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland.She returned home in 1963 to aFederal Bureau of Investigation interview about her attendance at the Communist-sponsored festival.[14]

During her second year at Brandeis, Davis decided to major in French and continued her intensive study of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Davis was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program. Classes were initially at Biarritz and later at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she and other students lived with a French family. She was in Biarritz when she learned of the1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed. She grieved deeply as she was personally acquainted with the young victims.[14]

Nearing completion of her degree in French, Davis realized her major interest was in philosophy instead. She became particularly interested in the ideas of Herbert Marcuse. On her return to Brandeis, she sat in on his course. Marcuse, she wrote, turned out to be approachable and helpful. She began making plans to attend the University of**Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy. In 1965 she graduated magna cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[14]

University of Frankfurt

In Germany, with a stipend of $100 a month, she first lived with a German family. Later, she moved with a group of students into a loft in an old factory. After visiting East Berlin during the annual May Day celebration, she felt that the East German government was dealing better with the residual effects of fascism than were the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union (SDS), and Davis participated in some SDS actions. Events in the United States, including the formation of the Black Panther Party and the transformation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black organization, made her ready to return there.[14]

Postgraduate work

Marcuse had moved to a position at the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there after her two years in Frankfurt.[14] On her way back, Davis stopped in London to attend a conference on "The Dialectics of Liberation." The black contingent at the conference included the Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and the British Michael X. Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, she was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing."[15]

She joined the Che-Lumumba Club (an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA), named for international Communist sympathizers and leaders Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, of Cuba and the Congo, respectively.[16]

Davis earned her master's degree from University of California-San Diego. She earned her doctorate in philosophy from the Humboldt University in East Berlin.[17]

Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, 1969–70

Beginning in 1969, Davis was an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Although both Princeton and Swarthmore had tried to recruit her, she opted for UCLA because of its urban location.[18] At that time, she was known as a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party USA, and an associate of the Black Panther Party.[6]

Angela Davis (center, no glasses) entersRoyce Hall at UCLA in October 1969 to give her first lecture.

The Board of Regents of the University of California, urged by then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, fired herfrom her $10,000 a year post in 1969 because of her membership in the Communist Party. The Board of Regents was censured by the American Association of University Professors for their failure to reappoint Davis after her teaching contract expired.[19] On October 20, when Judge Jerry Pacht ruled the Regents could not fire Davis solely because of her affiliation with the Communist Party, Davis resumed her post.[20]

The Regents released Davis again, on June 20, 1970, for the "inflammatory language" she had used in four different speeches. "We deem particularly offensive", the report said, "such utterances as her statement that the regents 'killed, brutalized (and) murdered' the People's Park demonstrators, and her repeated characterizations of the police as 'pigs'".[21][22][23]

Arrest and trial

See also: Marin County courthouse incident

george jackson:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soledad_Brothers

Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates accused of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison.[24]

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson,[bro of george] a heavily armed, 17-year-old African-American high-school student, gained control over a courtroom in Marin County, California. Once in the courtroom, Jackson armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages.[25][26] As Jackson transported the hostages and two black convicts away from the courtroom, the police began shooting at the vehicle. The judge and the three black men were killed in the melee; one of the jurors and the prosecutor were injured. Although the judge was shot in the head with a blast from the shotgun, he also suffered a chest wound from a bullet that may have been fired from outside the van. Evidence during the trial showed, however, that either could have been fatal.[27] The firearms which Jackson used in the attack, including the shotgun used to kill Judge Haley, had been purchased by Davis two days prior, and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawn off.[26] Davis was found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.[28]

As California considers "all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense... principals in any crime so committed", Marin County Superior Judge Peter Allen Smith charged Davis with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley" and issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours after the judge issued the warrant on August 14, 1970, a massive attempt to locate and arrest Angela Davis began. On August 18, 1970, four days after the initial warrant was issued, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover listed Davis on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List; she was the third woman and the 309th person to be listed.[25][29]

Soon after, Davis became a fugitive and fled California. According to her autobiography, during this time she hid in friends' homes and moved at night. On October 13, 1970, FBI agents found her at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City.[30] President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its "capture of the dangerous terrorist, Angela Davis."

While being held in the Women's Detention Center, Davis was initially segregated from other prisoners, in solitary confinement. With the help of her legal team, she obtained a federal court order to get out of the segregated area.[32]On January 5, 1971, Davis appeared at the Marin County Superior Court and declared her innocence before the court and nation: "I now declare publicly before the court, before the people of this country that I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the state of California." John Abt, general counsel of the Communist Party USA, was one of the first attorneys to represent Davis for her alleged involvement in the shootings.[31]

A defense motion for a change of venue was granted, and the trial was moved to Santa Clara County. On June 4, 1972, after 13 hours of deliberations,[27] the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty.[35] The fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was judged insufficient to establish her responsibility in the plot. She was represented by Leo Branton Jr., who hired psychologists to help the defense determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, a technique that has since become more common. He hired experts to discredit the reliability of eyewitness accounts.[36]

Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release. In New York City, black writers formed a committee called the Black People in Defense of Angela Davis. By February 1971 more than 200 local committees in the United States, and 67 in foreign countries, worked to free Davis from prison. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song: "Angela".[33] In 1972, after a sixteen-month incarceration, the state allowed her release on bail from county jail.[25] On February 23, 1972, Rodger McAfee, a dairy farmer fromFresno, California, paid her $100,000 bail with the help of Steve Sparacino, a wealthy business owner. Portions of her legal defense expenses were paid for by the United Presbyterian Church.[25][34]

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Soledad Brothers were three African-American inmates charged with the murder of a white prison guard, John Vincent Mills, at California's Soledad Prison on January 16, 1970.[1] George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were alleged to have murdered Mills in retaliation for the shooting deaths of three black prisoners during a prison fight in the exercise yard three days prior by another guard, Opie G. Miller.

Soledad Prison

George Jackson met W. L. Nolen through the Black Panther Party in Soledad State Prison in 1969. They were transferred together to the O Wing, along with Drumgo and Clutchette, which was considered the worst part of the adjustment center of which Max Row is a part. According to Jackson, in the O Wing "the strongest hold out no more than a couple of weeks. It destroys the logical processes of the mind, a man's thoughts become completely disorganized. The noise, madness streaming from every throat, frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls, the steel trays, the iron beds bolted to the wall, the hollow sounds from a cast-iron sink or toilet. The smells, the human waste thrown at us, unwashed bodies, the rotten food. When a white con leaves here he's ruined for life. No black leaves Max Row walking. Either he leaves on the meat wagon or he leaves crawling licking at the pig's feet."[2]

In Jackson's letters from the prison he describes the attitude of the staff toward the convicts as both defensive and hostile, apparently out of pure malevolence. His account of life at the prison was used by the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee.[citation ^needed]

Prison yard riot

On January 13, 1970, 14 black inmates and 2 white inmates from the maximum-security section of Soledad Prison were released into a recreation yard. It had been several months since they were last released into the yard.[3][4] The black prisoners were ordered to the far end of the yard, while the white prisoners remained near the center of the yard.[4] Officer Opie G. Miller, an expert marksman armed with a rifle, watched over the inmates from a guard tower 13 feet (4 m) above the yard.[4] A fist fight ensued and Miller opened fire on the prisoners below. No warning shot was fired. Three black inmates were killed in the shooting: W.L. Nolen and Cleveland Edwards died in the yard, while Alvin Miller died in the prison hospital a few hours later. A white inmate, Billy D. Harris, was wounded in the groin by Miller's fourth shot, and ended up losing a testicle.[4] In a letter from June 10, 1970, George Jackson described the scene as seeing three of his brothers having been "murdered [...] by a pig shooting from 30 feet above their heads with a military rifle." ^[2]

Following the incident, thirteen black prisoners began a hunger strike in the hopes of securing an investigation.[5] On January 16, 1970, a Monterey County grand jury convened, then exonerated Miller in the deaths of Nolen, Edwards, and Miller with a ruling of "justifiable homicide". No black inmates were permitted to testify, including those who had been in the recreation yard during the shooting. In Soledad Prison, inmates heard the grand jury's ruling on the prison radio.[4] Thirty minutes later, John V. Mills was found dying in another maximum-security wing of the prison, having been beaten and thrown from a third-floor tier of Y Wing, George Jackson's cellblock, to the television room below. On February 14, 1970, after an investigation into Mills' death by prison officials, George Lester Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Wesley Clutchette were indicted by the Monterey County grand jury for first-degree murder.[4]

Soledad Brothers Defense Committee

The Soledad Brothers Defense Committee was formed by Fay Stender to assist in publicizing the case and raising funds to defend Jackson, Drumgo, and Clutchette. Among the several celebrities, writers, and left-wing political activists that supported the SBDC and their cause were Julian Bond, Kay Boyle, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden, William Kunstler, Jessica Mitford, Linus Pauling, Pete Seeger, Benjamin Spock, and Angela Davis.[6][7][8] In June 1970, California State Senator Mervyn Dymally and the California Legislative Black Caucus pursued an investigation of Soledad Prison and released a report that tried to legitimize the committee and give it some credibility. Public reaction was mixed.[9] By the middle of that month, Davis was leading the movement.[9] Stender also arranged the publication of Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, which was to contain various letters written by Jackson while in prison detailing his time spent in the prison throughout the trial.

Jonathan Jackson's attempt to free the Soledad Brothers

Main article: Marin County courthouse incident

On August 7, 1970, George Jackson's seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan held up a courtroom during the trial of prisoner James McClain, charged at the time with the attempted stabbing of a Soledad guard at the Marin County Civic Center. Jonathan Jackson, after having armed McClain, temporarily freed three San Quentin prisoners, and took Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three women on the jury hostage to secure the freedom of the "Soledad Brothers". Jackson, McClain, Haley, and a prisoner named William Christmas were killed as they attempted to drive away from the courthouse. Haley died due to the discharge of a sawed-off shotgun that had been fastened to his neck with adhesive tape by the abductors. Thomas, prisoner Ruchell Magee, and one of the jurors were wounded.[10] Two days after his brother's death, in George Jackson's last letter in his collection of letters written while in prison, he wrote a letter to his deceased brother, signing it:

Cold and calm though.

'All right, gentlemen, I'm taking over now.' ^[nb ^1]

Revolution, George"[2]

Angela Davis, who purchased the guns used in the escape attempt, was later tried on several charges in connection with the escape. A jury found her not guilty on murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges.[11]

San Quentin Six

Main article: San Quentin Six

On August 21, 1971, days before his trial in the guard's killing, the 29-year-old Jackson allegedly launched a riot at San Quentin with a 9 mm pistol. There is controversy over the course of events that led to Jackson's obtaining of the firearm. Prison officials alleged that Stephen Bingham, the attorney who replaced Fay Stender[nb ^2] as Jackson's attorney, visited Jackson. Bingham was alleged to have smuggled Jackson a pistol and an Afro wig. He was purported to have given a wig to Jackson within in which to hide the gun. However, Bingham was found not guilty of this charge in an ensuing trial in 1986. Prison officials had claimed that as Jackson was attempting to leave his meeting with Bingham, a gun protruded from a wig he was wearing and Jackson was asked to show the object. With a gun in hand, Jackson released an entire floor of prisoners from the maximum-security wing, allegedly saying, "This is it, gentlemen, the Dragon has come!" In the ensuing melee, three guards were killed, as were two prisoners suspected of being snitches, before George Jackson rushed out into the yard where he was shot and killed by a guard. Other people involved in the case believe Jackson's death was a setup by prison authorities, who conspired to supply Jackson with a gun, in the hopes that he would be killed in the ensuing melee, allegedly because they saw his power as a threat to their control and authority. Inconsistencies in the stories, although common among eyewitnesses in many crimes, fueled the controversy and helped to set off an uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York three weeks later. Bingham's acquittal in 1986 on charges that he smuggled Jackson a gun and a wig, and was thereby responsible for the escape attempt and murders, occurred after he emerged from hiding for 13 years in order to stand trial.[13]

Trial

In San Francisco, proceedings were held in the Department 21 courtroom on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, the same courtroom in which Ruchell Magee would later be tried on charges related to the murder of Judge Haley.[14][15] Spectators, including the press, were separated from the proceedings by a $15,000 floor-to-ceiling barrier constructed of metal, wood, and bullet-proof glass.[14][nb ^3] Throughout the trial, there were attempts to annul the proceedings on technicalities. There were complaints on behalf of the defendants that they were not informed of the scheduled court hearing, specifically in a letter from George Jackson on June 13, 1970. They also claimed the court report stated that 1-48 pages of the testimony were recorded and they were only given 1-46 pages of testimony.[2] After Jackson's death, on March 27, 1972, the two surviving Soledad Brothers—Clutchette and Drumgo—were acquitted by a San Francisco jury of the original charges of murdering a prison guard on the grounds that the state had failed to completely prove its case.[16]

Notes

  1.  The final words Jonathan Jackson used in the San Rafael courthouse.[2]
  2.  Eight years after George Jackson's death, Fay Stender was shot in 1979, allegedly by a member of the Black Guerilla Family for not supporting Jackson's militarist politics. She suffered severe injuries that led to her paralysis. Stender committed suicide in May, 1980.[12]
  3.  The barrier was also reported to be soundproof, thereby requiring a public address system so that spectators could hear the proceedings.[14]

References

  1.  "Prison Guard Is Beaten to Death". Beaver County Times. January 17, 1970. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  2. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ ^c^ ^d^ ^e^ Jackson, George (1970). Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Toronto, Canada: Longmans Canada Limited. ISBN 978-0698103474.
  3.  Hatfield, Lary (January 7, 1985). "Last vestiges of radical movement will go on trial in Bingham case". The Day. New London, Connecticut: The Day Publishing Company. pp. 1–4. Retrieved July 15, 2011.
  4. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ ^c^ ^d^ ^e^ ^f^ Aptheker, Bettina (1969). The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8597-5.
  5.  "Negro Prisoners Begin Hunger Strike in Bid for Investigation". The Bulletin. January 15, 1970. Retrieved August 11, 2010.
  6.  Andrews, Lori (1999) [1996]. Black Power, White Blood: The Life and Times of Johnny Spain. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. p. 130. ISBN 9781566397506.
  7.  Bernstein, Lee (2010). "The Age of Jackson: George Jackson and the Radical Critique of Incarceration". America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807871171. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
  8.  Scott, Austin (October 18, 1970). "New Rebellion Brewing Inside Nation's Prisons". The Tuscaloosa News. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. AP. Retrieved July 13, 2011.
  9. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ Aptheker, B. (1999). The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801485978. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  10.  "Justice: A Bad Week for the Good Guys". TIME. August 1970. Retrieved June 4, 2008.
  11.  Caldwell. Earl. "Angela Davis Acquitted on All Charges", The New York Times, June 5, 1972.
  12.  James, Joy. Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. New York, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. pp. 86-87; ISBN 978-0742520271.
  13.  "People In The News: Ex-fugitive finally feels free, retains his political activism". The Register-Guard. Eugene, Oregon. June 28, 1987. p. 2A. Retrieved July 13, 2012.
  14. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ ^c^ Streeter, Harold V. (August 29, 1971). "'Soledad Brothers' Conflict Incites 11 Violent Deaths" (PDF). San Francisco Examiner. San Francisco, California. Retrieved July 21, 2010.
  15.  Streeter, Harold V. (August 18, 1972). "Magee Trial – Dullsville Revisited" (pdf). San Francisco, California. Retrieved July 21, 2010.
  16.  "Acquit Soledad Brothers", Pacific Stars and Stripes, March 29, 1972, p. 1

Further reading

Categories: 

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horowitz bs

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28053

The Worst School in America

By:David Horowitzand Jacob Laksin

FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, September 13, 2007

Misuse of the classroom by … allowing it to be used for political indoctrination … constitutes misuse of the University as an institution.

-- University of California Regents, “Policy on Course Content,” as amended September 22, 2005

Nestled in a redwood glade on cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, the University of California at Santa Cruz is one of the most picturesque campuses in America. Its 15,000 students attend classes in 62 majors at 10 colleges, in an environment that would seem an ideal locale for the contemplative life. In the hard sciences, it can be said that Santa Cruz handsomely fulfills its academic expectations. Its physics program is ranked among the best in the country, while its Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which houses the Lick Observatory, is a world class scientific institution. But inside the classrooms of its liberal arts division something besides the life of the mind is being nourished. In these environs,UC Santa Cruz is beyond any doubt the most radical university in the United States, its curricula anything but academic.

Emblematic of the politicized state of this public institution was the appointment in February 2005 of Denice Denton as university chancellor.A professor of engineering, Denton had made a name for herself as a radical feminist and anti-war activist.In her brief career as chancellor she made an additional mark as one of the academics whose angry protests led to the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers. Denton’s intemperate behavior extended beyond politics, leading to a series of scandals (a $600,000 renovation of her university residence and a $192,000-a-year university post for her lesbian lover) which brought her career to an abrupt end. The blowback from these and other episodes, along with her tortuous private life, culminated in her suicide on June 24, 2006, barely eighteen months after her appointment.

On the other hand, the regency academic radicals have established at Santa Cruz will continue without her.The school’s most celebrated faculty member is Angela Davis, a lifelong Communist, who retained her membership card even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Davis is one of seven designated “University Professors,” a title normally “reserved for scholars of international distinction.” Davis has produced nothing in her academic career besides ponderous Marxist political tracts. Her real distinction is to be a tireless agitator for radical causes, including a personal crusade to abolish the “prison-industrial complex.” 

In Davis’s view, all criminals who are members of racial or ethnic minorities are to be regarded as “political prisoners” and victims of American racism, and should be released. Davis’s holds an academic chair in Santa Cruz’s “History of Consciousness” program, which awarded a Ph.D. to Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton.Newton’s sole academic credentials were his radical rap sheet and a political tract exculpating the criminal organization he headed as a victim of government persecution. Santa Cruz accepted this worthless document as his doctoral thesis.

The “Department of Community Studies” at Santa Cruz is a typical example of the cornucopia of radical studies programs available to its students. One department offering is “The Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements,” whose contents are described in the Santa Cruz catalogue in these terms: “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.”[1]

..

History of Consciousness Program

The History of Consciousness Program at UCSC is among the most famous – or notorious -- academic programs in the country. This is less the legacy of the department’s academic achievements – which are nugatory -- than its association, throughout its nearly three-decade long history, with radical politics and questionable standards. Asked by one of the authors about the degree awarded to Huey Newton in the 1970s, historian Page Smith, the founder of the program, explained that he had created the program “to demonstrate that the PhD is fraud.”[9] Its political agendas are easily discerned in its mission statement, which proclaims the program’s focus on “the intersection of race, sexuality, and gender,” the standard troika of radical academic theory.

Radical Critiques of Penalty

HISC 208 A/B.

Instructor: Angela Y. Davis, Professor, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies.

A former Black Panther militant who purchased an arsenal of weapons that found their way into the hands of would-be hijacker whose ill-fated hostage-taking attempted in the killing of three people, including a California judge, Davis was once a vice presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket and received a Lenin Prize from the East German police state before the Berlin Wall came down. In 1997, Davis founded Critical Resistance, a group committed to dismantling the “prison industrial complex.”

In keeping with her opposition to all imprisonment, Davis has called for a “social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and their families” -- in short, a society where crime, however heinous, goes unpunished. Her book Are Prisons Obsolete? answers the title question in the affirmative, since prisons exist in the United States according to Davis, mainly to target “racially oppressed communities.”

Her course title, “Radical Critiques of Penalty,” reflects its narrow ideological perspective and substance. A “major goal” of the course, according to its catalogue description, is “to identify ways of disarticulating crime and punishment using race, class and gender as principal analytical categories.” Davis provides a more comprehensible definition of what she means in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? where she urges readers to acquire a more “nuanced understanding” of the “punishment system.”

This understanding is as follows: “We would recognize that ‘punishment’ does not follow from ‘crime’ in the neat logical discourses offered by discourses [sic] that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather punishment -- primarily through imprisonment (and sometimes death) -- is linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization of those most likely to be punished. It is associated with their class…gender structures the punishment system as well. (p.112)” In other words (to translate this linguistic mess) prisons do not exist to serve justice by punishing individuals who inflict injury on others but to carry out the sinister agendas of capitalist elites against minorities and the poor. It is certain that even Marx did not believe nonsense like this.

The main text for Davis’s course is Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by the Maoist sociologist Michel Foucault. A founding text of sorts for the radical anti-prison movement, the book deplores the very “principle of penal detention” and also calls for the abolition of prisons. Another text, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women, relates the stories of 37 women in Rikers Island prison, and attempts to rehabilitate them as innocent victims who were “compelled” to commit crime in order to “confront the deadly conditions of institutionalized racism, persistent poverty, and violence” of American society. Not a single text assigned in the course subjects such extreme and absurd claims to academic scrutiny.

Feminist Theory

HISC 217

Instructor: Donna Haraway, Professor in the Department of History of Consciousness and the Department of Feminist Studies.

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