Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

A genuine concern with documented ramifications when it comes to the perils of objecting to liberal consensus.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly.

Chances are very high many of these so-called intelligent scholars never heard of Thomas Sowell.

These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

No surprise there.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence.

This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

And that’s how petty, narrow-minded liberals want it as true debate, involving facts, trigger them into name-calling hysterics.

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

While white liberals are going out of their way to be considerate of black people in conjunction with the latest George Floyd fad, how long before they go back to normal?

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans?

That is a common sense question that tends to be conveniently dismissed as a straw man argument.

This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”.

“Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

According to the left, since we all look alike, we’re supposed to think alike and as they so authorize.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

As have many who dared ask any questions about #BlackLivesMatter’s motives and actions.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people.

Fact.

There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

Good luck with that.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.

Here’s where truth becomes problematic.

Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

There have been zero documented marches by #BlackLivesMatter for any of the dozens who are injured or killed by black-on-black gun violence that occurs in major metropolitan cities on any given weekend in the United States, and we all know why that is.

The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim.

It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

No real discussion was had prior to this recent provocation and expect none in the near future, if at all. At least by the left.

Now, here’s where the gut punches begin….

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party.

An acknowledgement of the hypocrisy, thus failure of the Democrat plantation perpetually unrewarded.

Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you. The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

Just witness the shallow overtures by the Hollywood elite; arm-in-arm with the “mostly peaceful” #BlackLivesMatter George Floyd protests… that is, until they get a wee too close to Beverly Hills. Then all means to redirect, by those dreaded police, are silently approved of.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Shaun King, DeRay Mckesson, Angela Rye, Reverend William J. Barber II, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch… the list is long.

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

No, but they’ll gladly take student tuition money while committing gross educational misconduct.

Now, here’s what could get this black professor fired on the spot….

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

The left has long history of being apologists for the worst in our society. Robert Byrd, Harvey Weinstein (until he became inconvenient), Roman Polanski, including any black person with a less-than-stellar past who had a fatal run-in with the police and became the martyr-du-jour.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

Bleeding heart liberals are the most condescending people in our society, especially when it comes to their low expectations of black people.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating.

Few of the UC Berkeley professoriate can relate to the way their black colleagues live because they seldom go to an impoverished area and interact with those whose plight they lament with scholarly conviction.

No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

Just look at the way black history has been whitewashed and rewritten by the Democrat left so they can further imprison a whole people, just for their unrewarded vote.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

And has been for decades. This will not change any time soon.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM.

I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.

I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.

I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free. /end

Again, blacks are the only group in the United States that are denied freedom of political association, freedom of thought, and freedom of choice. Colleges used to actively promote themselves as a place that embraced “the free exchange of ideas”.

If you’re black, expressing a point of view not authorized by the Democrat left can cost you dearly.

Ask those of us who know.

People online and all over the world are cheering on actress, producer and now activist Ellen Pompeo after she called out a crew in the middle of an interview for not being diverse enough. And while she said there were a lot of women in the room, the “Grey’s Anatomy” star was disappointed with the lack of color behind the lens.
— ABC News, 11/20/18

It’s like this is the first time Ellen Pompeo ever walked into a network television lobby, or newsroom, photo shoot or Hollywood set and the majority of minorities she sees are security guards and cleaning crews, those carrying the heavy video cameras on live remotes, not to mention those who maintain the opulent properties of her and her friends. But she tries to come off like she’s moved and really cares.

Ellen Pompeo could’ve done more and insisted on the hiring of more qualified minorities on her productions IF she really wanted to; IF it even came to mind.

Ellen Kathleen Pompeo (born November 10, 1969) is an American actress, director, and producer. She is one of the highest paid television actors, having signed a $20 million annual contract with the American Broadcasting Company in late 2017. She was honored with the 2007 Special Achievement in Entertaining by the National Italian American Foundation for her contributions to the entertainment industry.

Pompeo was then cast in ABC’s popular medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and garnered worldwide recognition for her portrayal of the title character Dr. Meredith Grey. The role on the long running series earned her a Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award. The character became widely popular, making Pompeo one of the most renowned television actresses. In 2016, Pompeo was ranked fourth in the list of highest paid TV actresses by Forbes, with earnings of $14.5 million; she became the third highest paid female and the fifth highest paid actor overall in 2018 with earnings of $23.5 million. She was also the highest ranked actor from a drama series on the list.
— Wikipedia

It’s so easy to bravely speak out against Hollywood after you’ve gotten yours.

Do an online search and aside from her husband and children, do you see Ellen Pompeo pictured around minorities? Not much. Has she ever boasted about the minorities in the productions she’s been involved in that’s made her millions? No.

“This day has been incredible, and there’s a ton of women in the room, but, I don’t see enough color. And I didn’t see enough color when I walked in the room today,” Pompeo opens.

Hollywood celebrities are constantly looking for attention they can monetize. They hire publicists who do nothing but plot how to garner positive press for their clients.

And let’s not forget: Ellen Pompeo is an actress.

Liberal Hollywood is a notoriously racist industry and has been documented as such on numerous occasions. The fact some still believe they can act all shocked about the roaches in their custom-made cabinets is nauseating.

“As Caucasian people, it’s our job. It’s our task, it’s our responsibility to make sure we speak up in every single room we walk into. It’s our job because we created the problem,” she added.

After today….

There are many who could do much more to open the door for people who just want an opportunity to compete and not have to be relegated to positions those in control tolerate them to be placed in.

Ellen Pompeo now feels better about herself because she knew how her words would be taken, had a convenient hankie handed to her, and social media is “cheering” her today.

Mission accomplished.

There are many conservatives who dutifully work behind-the-scenes to advance causes and push back against liberal policies and laws they deem harmful. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of people who’ve just discovered an issue, are outraged, post a rant on social media, and become an overnight sensation. One would want to believe their intentions are sincerely about an issue, but in the instant-gratification world we live in, coupled with audiences that are quick to show praise without examining possible motivation, we’re now being inundated with narcissists who believe they have something to say; something we’ve never heard about until they came along and now want to be the next Moses to take us all to the Promised Land.

This Tweet really sums it up.

At least he didn’t wear a Trump dress.

Note the arrogance here as Lutchman assumes, despite his limited life-experience (he’s 23), “No one is talking enough about the left’s racial discrimination of black conservatives!” and there are “many other issues” HE wants to bring to the forefront. Newsflash: many have been talking about this for decades. Obviously, he just hasn’t been led by the hand and shown where to look.

But he’s not alone, the motivations are almost totally self-serving, and Fox News is the Holy Grail to many in the movement because it can now literally lead to a job in and around the Trump White House, even though some fought against him during the 2016 presidential primary.

We sadly know many conservatives who are issue-illiterate because if they didn’t see it on Fox News, it never happened. What’s worse are those who know what the conservative media believes their audience prefers and are quick to oblige.

If Mr. Lutchman was really paying attention, he’d know his chances of making it anywhere near FNC are pretty low because he’s probably not very secure walking in six-inch heels. If he does get an opportunity to appear, it will be about one topic and one topic only: race, and those opportunities will be limited to a specific, breaking event.

But this is not at all just about black conservatives by any means. There are many out there whose overall goal is not just the mission but personal stardom, at least stardom as they personally define it.

As a guest and studio supervisor for on-air talent who appeared via remote “drop”, getting on Fox News was an overrated experience. You’re only on for less than four minutes and much of that time is the host setting up the segment to the audience and then giving his or her opinion, leaving that person steered into saying he or she agrees with the host as often as possible.

But if it’s all about being famous and becoming the latest conservative “it”, go for it and don’t expect everyone to blindly go into seal-clap mode. In the case of those who’ve just discovered black conservatism, they will find all the praise they desire on Facebook and Twitter.

Doing something that really makes a difference?

Uh oh. That’s too hard and it’s clear some wouldn’t even know where to start.