The following is an op-ed submitted by the Revolution Club, UCLA to the UCLA newspaper the Daily Bruin, which refused to publish it. Where is the “free speech” in that?! We are publishing it here with permission from the Club.

UCLA hosts a genocide justifier and students allow it! Heather Mac Donald uses a shoddy intellectual veneer to justify a genocide against Black and Brown people.

April 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The Bruin Republicans are notorious for promoting and encouraging hate speech and violence against minority groups on campus by putting on events such as, “An Illegal Immigrant Killed My Child,” “Feminism Is a Cancer” with Milo Yiannopoulos, and holding anti-trans signs at an anti-trans lecture held at UC Santa Barbara. The event they put on last Wednesday, “Blue Lives Matter with Heather Mac Donald” was no different.

Mac Donald is notorious for arguing:

• “The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot.”
• “It is not racism that puts black men in jail, it’s their own behavior.”
• “[T]he opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not.”

Quotes from: (https://www.city-journal.org/html/jena-dodge-10301.html)

She even goes so far as to say that “there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that Black Lives Matter than the police, and that proactive policing has helped reduce serious crime in predominantly black neighborhoods—but that the false Black Lives Matter narrative hurts innocent black lives as police pull back and violent crime rises.” (https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32050/)

These statements are just bald-faced lies!! There are plenty of studies exposing the criminalization of Black people, racial bias in policing, and the lack of availability of opportunities for Black people in America. Just to cite a few of the hundreds:

• Despite the similarity in factors such as criminal records and severity of offense “white men aged 18-29 were 38% less likely to be sentenced to prison than Black men of the same age group.” (The Sentencing Project, “Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A Review of the Literature,” 2005)
• Though Black people make up only 13% of monthly drug users, they account for 35% of arrests for drug possession, 55% of convictions, and 74% of prison sentences. (The Sentencing Project, “Drug Policy and the Criminal Justice System,” April 2001)
• A Milwaukee study had Black and white applicants interview for the same jobs, reporting similar educational and employment backgrounds. Employers were twice as likely to call back white applicants with no criminal records as Black applicants with no criminal records. And they were MORE likely to call back whites who said they had criminal backgrounds than Blacks who reported no criminal records!

Second, when she sheds crocodile tears for victims of “Black on Black” crime, she blames the “criminals” but fails to look at the root cause of crime in Black communities. Even the conservative author, Edward Luttwak, looks at reality for what it is and argues that crime is a rational choice for millions of inner city youth! Mac Donald never mentions the deindustrialization that took the factories from Black neighborhoods to the Third World, or any of the other factors that led Luttwak to his analysis. She doesn’t talk about cutbacks on social services, declining school quality, segregation (and the lack of resources for predominantly Black or Brown neighborhoods), or the origins of the police in slavery. Mac Donald ignores too much of reality to cite in one article. She does not look at the system of capitalism, which is the cause of these conditions, a system which sees Black people as expendable and which has been waging a slow genocide against Black and Brown people for decades (with mass incarceration and murder by police as the leading edges of that).

Should we be shutting events like this down or fostering intellectual debate by “asking pointed questions”?

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To be clear, this event was not an act of “Free Speech” but an act of outright hate speech chock-full of anti-Blackness and this dangerously genocidal white supremacist rhetoric is backed up by the state power of the fascists who are now in the White House. Mac Donald’s logic leads to the conclusion that it’s either an inherent quality of Black people to commit crime or it’s just “naturally” a part of Black culture. Unsurprisingly, she said to a student that if Black people raised their kids better, there wouldn’t be as much crime. She is either delusional or she is a rabid white supremacist―either way, the lies she is spreading should not be legitimized or normalized. The most concerning part is that evidence points to her being the latter. She is fighting to undercut the ability of Black people to stand up and fight their oppression as a people. She is fighting to strengthen the police. This is like locking someone in their house and setting it on fire! You take away the ability of people to fight back while you unleash horrors on them.

The university has always been a battleground of ideas, and this takes on increasing importance in the time of Trump/Pence where the truth is being rewritten in a fascist image. In fact, people like Heather Mac Donald, Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz, and other rabid fascist ideologues, are playing an important role in normalizing fascism in the universities. You can’t foster intellectual debate with a white supremacist fascist like Mac Donald who views Black and Brown people as less than human! This was not a presentation of an “intellectual” perspective on police murder, but an act of violence. Mac Donald’s “statistics” are lies! They cover over and justify a bloodthirsty criminal rampage that the pigs are given the green light to unleash on Black and Brown masses. Allowing people like Mac Donald to even step foot on any campus contributes to the normalization of white supremacy and fascism, all of which now holds power under Donald Trump’s regime. To be clear, there is a DIRECT link between Mac Donald’s logic and Trump’s genocidal rhetoric of “stopping the carnage in Chicago” (aka unleashing the pigs to terrorize, brutalize, and murder Black people on an even greater scale), a link which Mac Donald made herself in her speech.

Instead of acting like well-behaved children who play by the rules, students need to stop being so defensive and say NO MORE! We will not tolerate the normalization of fascism on campus, and we will not tolerate the consolidation of fascism in America. Students have to stop this with the fire and determination of those in the Claremont McKenna College who shut down Mac Donald Thursday, of the Berkeley students who shut down Milo, of the Middlebury students who shut down the author of The Bell Curve. Doing so is commensurate with what we are facing right now politically, and is all the more powerful given what is at stake. We need to shut events like this down as part of the fight to drive this regime from power at the soonest possible time!

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