The University of California (San Francisco) is under fire this week after hosting a racist speaker who attacked white people as psychopaths and claimed that black women can be legally raped. A conservative campus group posted clips from the event in which author Dante King lambasted the United States and its institutions as racist and maintaining a white “rape culture.”
Imagine if a speaker or professor gave a lecture that called blacks “psychopaths” and responsible for a rape culture.
The university would be quickly shutdown in a campus-wide effort at introspection, condemnation, and healing. Instead, King’s lecture was followed by applause.
.@UCSF invited Dante King to speak on "Diagnosing Whiteness."
— YAF (@yaf) February 9, 2024
He claims that "whites are psychopaths" and that white people "have it written in the law you can rape black women." He also makes excuses for black teenagers who commit violent crimes.
This is the modern university. pic.twitter.com/EzVlliZPR9
During the Black History Month event, King delivered a lecture titled “Diagnosing Whiteness and Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis and Trauma in America.”
He explained how
“whites are psychopaths… and their behavior represents an underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. How many of you can see the proclivity that evolved deep within the evolutionary history of Whiteness? By show of hands, how many of you could see it? Some people are sitting here, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to raise my hand,’ that’s called denial.”
King said he is not worried about how the whites in the audience react because he does not value or prioritize their feelings or views: “I’m not seeking agreement from White people at all. I don’t prioritize Whiteness or White people in my work in that way.”
There was little need to consider any whites on campus and what they think because “I think Whites are psychopathic. I think there are many lies. The level of lying that White people do that has started since colonialism. We’re just used to it.”
He also denounced the United States and its institutions as based on “anti-Blackness” as “the foundation of all American, all White American institutions.” Presumably, that is why
“there is no discussion about the delusions and the perversion of Whiteness. Say this with me: rape culture in America is a legal, economic, and moral institution. So we’re going to…we have it written in the law, you can rape Black women – but we’ve never been a racist country. This goes beyond gaslighting, and it’s rooted in psychological delusion. “
UC-San Francisco is full of faculty who have expressly committed themselves to being anti-racist but there was nary a complaint about this vehemently racist lecture.
There is nothing new. As we have previously discussed, professors have advocated “detonating white people,” denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer, strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters, and other outrageous statements.
University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis defended the murder of a conservative protester and said he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence.
Last year, Hunter College Professor Shellyne Rodríguez was only fired after being arrested for holding a machete to the neck of a New York Post reporter and threatening to “chop you up.”
Yet, she was not fired after she destroyed the pro-life display of a group of students. It was only later that she was fired after holding a machete to the neck of a journalist.
They are all part of the radical chic of academia and they have little fear of repercussions for their rhetoric.
Conversely, there is little tolerance for conservatives who seek to express their views.
The suspension of Ilya Shapiro is a good example. Other faculty have had to go to court to defend their free speech rights. One professor was suspended for being seen at a controversial protest.
We discussed how St. Joseph’s University refused to renew a contract for a professor who actually prevailed in such a free speech fight. A conservative North Carolina professor faced calls for termination over controversial tweets and was pushed to retire. Dr. Mike Adams, a professor of sociology and criminology, had long been a lightning rod of controversy. In 2014, we discussed his prevailing in a lawsuit that alleged discrimination due to his conservative views. He was then targeted again after an inflammatory tweet calling North Carolina a “slave state.” That led to his being pressured to resign with a settlement. He then committed suicide just days before his last day as a professor.
Yet, to even criticize an extremist speaker like King is to risk being ostracized and cancelled by one’s colleagues. Instead, you have professors and students sitting and listening to a virulently racist diatribe . . . only to politely applaud at the end. It is hard to see how this is any part of a celebration of Black History month as opposed to its debasement. To use this month to voice racist tropes and attacks should be offensive to everyone.
My greatest concern is not that offensive views are being shared on campus. King should be protected by free speech values and campuses should be places where a wide variety of viewpoints are heard. Rather, my concern is that such tolerance only seems to run to those on the far left. It is not evidence of the diversity but the hypocrisy and orthodoxy in higher education.
