Cheers to Claremont Colleges Students:
White Supremacist Fascist Shut Down at Claremont McKenna College
April 11, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
On Thursday, April 6, students at the Claremont Colleges (in eastern Los Angeles County) blocked the entrances to the building on the campus of Claremont McKenna College (CMC) where white supremacist, fascist Heather Mac Donald was scheduled to speak. People attempting to enter the building were blocked and could not enter.
Mac Donald writes for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. She authored the book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, where she criticized Black Lives Matter and said that criminals have been emboldened by the scrutiny of police shootings. She says that police deserve more support and less scrutiny.
Over 250 students from the six Claremont campuses took part in the protest, shouting “Shut it down,” “Black lives matter,” “From Oakland to Greece, fuck the police,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The protest was organized on Facebook by a group called “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists.” They stated that it was wrong to permit Claremont McKenna’s Institute of State and Local Government to “host the notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald. As a community, we cannot and will not allow fascism to have a platform… Mac Donald openly advocates and encourages mass incarceration of black and brown folks in the U.S. by explicitly stating racist constructions of ‘black crime.’ As the Amerikkkan state monopolizes violence, the judicial system is a branch of many institutions that protect the interests of rich white supremacists… The way fascism is masked as ‘free speech’ is not any ‘normal’ exercise of constitutional power. White supremacists such as Heather Mac Donald claim protection from free speech as an exercise of constitutional rights forgetting that the Constitution was created by slave owners.”
Students were being organized to “show CMC that having this speaker is an attack on marginalized communities both on campus and off. Together, we can hold CMC accountable and prevent Mac Donald from spewing her racist, anti-Black, capitalist, imperialist, fascist agenda.”
It was reported that the cops had to smuggle Mac Donald out a back door and take her to a room with no audience where her presentation was live-streamed to another part of the campus.
The CMC administration said they were disappointed that they had to shut down the event and that this was an affront to free speech. Students have been threatened with action against them for taking part in the protest. However, no arrests were made at that time.
Right on to the Claremont students.
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