Tony Platt GoodToGo

THE LIVING DEAD

    The first day that we arrive at one of my favorite places in the world, I look in my diary to check the date of our departure. “Stop using the calendar,” CC advises. She’s an expert on deep relaxation. I have to work on it.

    But it’s not a big challenge, even for me, to unwind here.

    We’ve been to La Bastide de Moustiers, this hotel in the alps of Provence, many times since CC discovered it in a fancy travel magazine while waiting in an oncologist’s office. She prayed for a visit before she kicked the bucket. Decades and many visits later, we’re back like observant and grateful pilgrims. “Welcome home” are the first words we hear. We catch up on our personal lives with the manager, Sarah; we greet long-time staff with a kiss on both cheeks; we move into our familiar bedroom facing the mountains; we sit at the same table on the patio under an anything-but-plane tree planted almost fifty years ago; we eat our daily picnic in a shaded meadow, next to an organic garden that stretches out of sight; we consult with a brilliant chef about the nightly menu; and we book massages with a woman from the village who knows how to unknot the most overwrought shoulders.

    Every morning, we follow our well-trod routes through and beyond the village of Marie Ste. Moustiers, one of France’s “plus beau villages,” a miracle of construction above the Gorge Verdon. When we are not scrupulously placing one foot in front of the other, we stop, look, watch, listen, breathe, be.

    In the afternoons, when it’s too hot to go out, even for mad dogs and Englishmen, I work in the hotel’s library. “Your office,” says Sarah. Here, I read the news from home about the election race between fascists and warmongers, and about one climate crisis after another. I write about humanity at its worst – land grabs, grave-robbing, white supremacy – but still I manage to leave my angst in the library and dive deeply into the pleasures of this place.

    One day, on the advice of Moïses who has lived in the area all his life and knows places off the tourist grid, we borrow the hotel car, follow the winding road above the sparkling green river that splices the gorge, turn left at La-Palud-Sur-Verdon, and follow an even narrower road that climbs above mountain meadows and goat farms. We park and complete the journey on tired feet, uphill, always uphill, until we reach what is now the unpeopled “village abandonée” of Chateauneuf-Lès-Moustiers (literally, The-New-Castle-Near-Moustiers) that overlooks the Baou Valley. We try to imagine how people built a thriving village here in the 11^th century, added a castle in the 13^th century (thus its name), and worked the land below for another seven centuries.

    In my research, I’m used to contemporary narratives that pretty up the past and gloss over its sorrows and tragedies. Back home, California’s extraordinary beauty is drenched in bloodshed, yet my university’s public relations department in Berkeley would no doubt describe Chateauneuf’s demise as an inevitable surrender to Progress.

    We huff and I puff our way to the entrance to the village. The first and only text that greets us is a memorial to the young men of the village whose lives were wasted during World War I. Eleven “enfants de Chateauneuf morts pour la patrie” are listed by name, some clearly related. Elsewhere, I read that the number of dead could have reached twenty. A few years later, the surviving women and old men left the village, unable to sustain themselves.

    Not too long ago, a commercial real estate company had the idea of building upscale housing on the site. But descendants and local residents blocked the idea.

    This village is not abandoned. It’s a living memorial and a forewarning.

 August 30, 2024, Haute Provence, France.

Oppenheimer-The-Movie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the University of California

Cal Berkeley was created in the 1860s-1870 and for its first fifty years was the only full-scale campus of the University of California that today includes ten sites. Contrary to its public reputation, the campus where I first became an anti-war activist in the 1960s has always been one of academia’s premier beneficiaries of militarism – from the genocide of California Tribes and invasion of Mexico in the 19^th century, to its contemporary role in co-managing three of the country’s leading nuclear weapons research facilities.

It is not surprising, then, that the University of California, Berkeley – known locally as “Cal” and worldwide as “Berkeley” – welcomed Oppenheimer’s director Christopher Nolan and a large film crew to the campus in June 2022. “A major Hollywood studio sent UC Berkeley back to the 1940s,” reported the office of public affairs. “Dozens of vehicles trucked in extras and set dressing, including an incredible amount of potted plants and trees to cover up modern additions like bike racks and disabled parking signs.”

While the movie and subsequent publicity focuses primarily on the individual actions and angst of a Great But Troubled Man, too little attention has been paid to how a leading public university participated in creating a weapon of mass destruction that changed the means of warfare forever.

When the film was released, a display case in the physics building showcased an ad for the movie. A physics professor eulogized Oppenheimer as a “charismatic leader” who elevated the department into one of the top programs in the world. “Oppenheimer is a very important figure in world history,” added a retired Cal history professor.

There’s a long precedent for this kind of uncritical collaboration with the military.

By the early 20^th century, some one thousand student cadets were drilling on the Berkeley campus, organized as a regiment with a marching band that paraded in blackface on special occasions. During World War I, the university turned over grounds, buildings, and equipment to the War Department; required students in the German department to sign a loyalty oath; and contracted with the US Army to train 3,000 cadet pilots.

“One could summon up images of West Point by just looking out on the Berkeley campus,” recalled a professor about his experience teaching at Cal in the late 1930s. By the time that the United States entered World War II in late 1941, the university had turned over its arsenal of knowledge to the government by providing research, technical support, and officer training, as well as living quarters, to army and navy personnel. In 1944, about one quarter of all male students were involved with the navy.  

More significantly, the university formally and secretly committed its scientific knowhow to national offense. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government funded physicist Ernest Lawrence’s team to develop a new kind of weapons system. At its peak, Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory employed 1,250 staff at a cost of about half million dollars per month. In the summer of 1942, a group of scientists, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer who had worked at Berkeley since 1929, met regularly in LeConte Hall (named in honor of professors who had helped to arm the Confederacy and remained lifelong white supremacists) where they prepared the first blueprint of the atomic bomb and discussed the possibility of creating a thermonuclear bomb.

In 1942, the University of California and the US Department of Energy jointly selected a site in New Mexico to locate the Los Alamos National Laboratory where the Manhattan Project designed and developed the perversely named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs that killed an estimated 200,000 civilians and left devastated survivors with long-term health issues.

What the University of California regarded as fifty-four thousand acres of “mostly uninhabited” land appropriated for the Lab was, according to Tewa Women United, an important place called Tsankawi that was once an Indigenous homeland on the Parajito Plateau. The Manhattan Project prohibited Native Americans from even visiting their burial sites.

Oppenheimer-the-biopic has nothing to say about Cal Berkeley-the-institution that received massive federal funds to do research on the atomic bomb and  partnered with the US government to appropriate ancestral lands in New Mexico. In addition to running the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California also governed a town of several thousand people that housed the families of scientists and staff.

Robert Oppenheimer represented the university, not just himself, when the Lab participated in dangerous scientific practices, such as the dumping of millions of gallons of radioactive waste into New Mexico’s Puerco River; and withholding from colleagues and the public information about a long history of risk-taking and radiation exposure that killed and injured Los Alamos staff. Oppenheimer “does not explore in any depth the costs of deciding to test the bomb in a place where my family and many others had lived for generations,” writes Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Her organization has documented “eight decades of loss of life and health that was a consequence of the development and testing of the atomic bomb.”

Robert Oppenheimer represented the university, not just himself, when he helped to select Hiroshima as the best site to demonstrate the bomb’s “effective damage,” knowing that its explosive yield of about 15,000 tons of TNT would kill at least 20,000 civilians if exploded in the air. When asked after the war if he had any regrets, given that he significantly under-counted the number of dead, he replied: “I did my job which was the job I was supposed to do.”

The University of California’s reluctance to reckon with its culpability in the Manhattan Project is replicated in the Berkeley campus’ commemorative culture of selective remembering and planned obliviousness.

It is not only bike racks and parking signage that have been covered up. 

A plaque in the physics building recognizes Oppenheimer for creating “the greatest school of theoretical physics the United States has ever known,” but says nothing about the university’s direct role in the vaporization of thousands of women, children, and elderly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another plaque at the entrance to the university that  honors Japanese American faculty and students does not mention the five hundred Japanese American students expelled by the University of California in 1942 in compliance with President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Similarly, a recent exhibition at Cal Berkeley on “the incarceration of Japanese Americans” during World War II evades the university’s complicity in policies that imprisoned thousands without trial for crimes they did not commit.

The University of California has formally administered but not educationally oversighted a public museum in Los Alamos (now known as the Bradbury Science Museum) since 1954 and its magazine (The Atom) since 1964. It provides an imprimatur of academic legitimacy while delegating all curatorial and editorial decisions to a museum that functions as a public relations conduit for the military. “I’ve never heard of UC faculty being involved in any Bradbury exhibit development,” the current director of the museum told me.

Cal Berkeley had a rare opportunity to be involved, albeit indirectly, in creating a national discussion about the decision to experiment with atomic weapons in Japan when Michael Heyman, a former Berkeley law professor (1959-74) and chancellor (1980-1990) was appointed the Secretary (namely, chief executive) of the Smithsonian National Museum. Heyman initially supported an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum that would at lease complicate the prevailing jingoistic narrative. The initial script included both the fuselage of the Enola Gay and a lunch box filled with carbonized rice and peas – all that parents could find remaining of their daughter. Under political pressure, Heyman cancelled the exhibition and replaced it with a celebration of the plane that dropped the bomb.

A university that promotes itself as a bastion of free speech and incubator of social justice has become too accustomed to treating its own origins as a Hollywood script and sidestepping  controversial issues that might interfere with an inspirational narrative of the past.

Institutional silence is habit-forming.

If Cal Berkeley is seriously committed, as its brand proclaims, to becoming “one of world’s great public universities, asking questions and improving the world,” it needs to put its “brightest minds” to work on illuminating its own history.

_________

This is adapted from my book The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley (Heyday) and was first published in Scheerpost, August 31, 2023.

IT'S TIME FOR A "BIG GIVE BACK" CAMPAIGN AT CAL BERKELEY

 

       A recent year-long investigation by ProPublica and NBC News confirmed what is widely known on the UC Berkeley campus: Cal is the least compliant with the 1990 federal law that ordered the university to speedily repatriate these remains to their biological and cultural descendants. In response to this in-depth reporting, university administrators declined an interview and instead issued an unsigned, callously unreflective statement promising to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) by 2033 ­ – forty-three years after passage of the federal legislation.

For the past three years I have been doing research for the Berkeley Truth and Justice Project, trying to understand how a university that brands itself an advocate of social justice sidesteps any controversial issues that might disrupt inspirational narratives marketed to prospective students and alumni. Its public relations strategy relies on tactics honed in corporate boardrooms and political think tanks – damage control, procrastination, and diversion of system-wide issues into bureaucratic silos.

The university justified the plunder of Native patrimony in the name of scientific racism and preserving the culture of a “disappearing race,” while it ignored the survivors of genocide and their descendants who organized stubborn resistance, ranging from polite petitions to rambunctious confrontations.  As early as 1906, the Yokayo Rancheria in northern California hired a high-powered law firm to threaten charges against the University of California if they did not return their ancestors’ remains excavated by Berkeley anthropologists. When a local newspaper reported that “Grave Robbers May Have to Answer for Crime,” Cal quickly complied. Today, Tribes continue to speak out against what Sam Cohen of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians characterizes as “the number one bad actor” in the state: UC Berkeley.

Academia, I’ve learned, functions not just in the service of power but as a powerful institution in its own right. This is what has permitted the university – despite multiple State audits excoriating Berkeley’s noncompliance with NAGPRA –  to continue to sit on the largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the United States, possibly the largest in the world. Cal’s refusal to honor the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People is one of many examples of its callous disregard for the human cost of knowledge.

As I recently walked through the Berkeley campus – past buildings, statues, and plaques that celebrate the appropriation of Native homelands to finance the University of California; that dignify entrepreneurs who built their fortunes from the plunder of war and conquest; that erase Cal’s significant role in usurping tribal lands in New Mexico in order to build and deploy the first weapon of mass destruction against Japanese civilians; and that enshrine academics who polished their careers by making white supremacy respectable – I was reminded of Yurok Judge Abby Abinanti’s admonition that “the hardest mistakes to correct are those that are ingrained.”

March inaugurated Cal Berkeley’s Big Give campaign to raise millions of dollars in donations to a university dedicated to “making the world a better place.” How about a Big Give Back campaign also, starting with compensating the Tribes and Native organizations whose land, blood, ancestors, cultural heritage, and traditional knowledge are inseparably tied to the university’s origins and rise to global prominence? Returning thousands of human cadavers and hundreds of thousands ceremonial artifacts – pillaged from Indigenous burial grounds from Egypt to the San Francisco Bay Area – would be a good place to begin a process of apology, justice, and reparations.

In addition to a Big Give Back campaign that compensates the victims of the university’s success, we also must do everything we can, in the words of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, to “bring this thing out to the light.” Cal Berkeley cultivates a culture of forgetfulness reminiscent of Turkey’s officially mandated amnesia about the genocide of Armenians in the early 20^th century and Spain’s “collective pact of forgetting” after the death of Franco. It applies its slogan “Fiat Lux” — let there be light — everywhere but to itself.  The “greatest public university in the world” needs to illuminate its own dark past.

To paraphrase Langston Hughes, our challenge is to make the university into a place “that never has been yet/And yet must be.” Whatever steps are taken to do justice to history, the process must involve the active, substantial, and equitable involvement of Tribes and Native organizations whose ancestors’ lives and deaths constitute the university’s material and cultural foundations.

____________

Originally published, in a shorter vision as “It’s Time for Cal to Return Native American Remains,” in Berkeleyside, March 28, 2023.

THIS IS HATE SPEECH

Tony Platt and Jonathan Simon*

The Right loves to make a demonized Berkeley into a target of its campaigns and is very effective at turning progressive ideas into their opposite. The movement to diversify language and cultural dogmatism was transformed into Stalinist political correctness. Efforts to broaden the teaching of American history became anti-white critical race theory.

Now, a rightwing smear organization, the Orwellian “Accuracy in Media,” is trying to equate hate speech with Berkeley students’ right to call out racism in Israel. Moreover, it is now targeting activists by name.

The controversy began when Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley Law adopted a bylaw amendment pledging to dis-invite speakers who publicly defend Israel against charges of apartheid and systematic discrimination against Palestinians. The bylaw was promoted by campus-wide Students for Justice in Palestine (a pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions group). Whatever one’s political position on this issue, the group’s policy is not a ban on speakers who are Jewish, or Israeli, or even speakers who take issue with aspects of the BDS movement. Moreover, it is Constitutionally protected speech that should be secure on ground zero of the Free Speech Movement.

Calling for a boycott of Israel on the basis of its racist policies towards Palestinians is not anti-Semitic. It is in the tradition of the successful movement to divest the university’s economic portfolio from apartheid in South Africa, a demand that was initially discredited and criminalized. In fact, many Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, as well as human rights organizations – B’teselm, Yesh Din, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International – take the position that Israel is an apartheid regime. “Boycott, divestment, and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states,” notes the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism” (https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/).

The University’s linguistic gymnastics conflates critiques of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism, in line with the U.S. State Department’s endorsement of a policy that fits its foreign policy objectives. Berkeley follows the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition that, inter alia, characterizes anti-Semitism as criticizing Israel for engaging in a “racist endeavor.”

Berkeley goes beyond the Alliance’s position (https://2017-2021.state.gov/defining-anti-semitism/index.html) by arguing that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, in the words of Chancellor Christ, “poses a direct and serious threat to the academic freedom of our students and faculty, as well as the unfettered exchange of ideas and perspectives on our campus, include debate and discourse regarding conflicts in the Middle East.”

How can ideas be unfettered if some are excluded?

In addition to circulating defamatory stories about what is happening at Berkeley Law, “Accuracy in Media” has recently driven a mobile billboard around Berkeley that likens Students for Justice in Palestine to Nazism, and slanders by name members of our community as anti-Semites. This provocation, in the words of Dean Chemerinsky, endangers “the safety of our students.”

This is the essence of hate speech.

The positions taken by student organizations that advocate justice and human dignity for Palestine are consistent with our university’s stated aspiration to becoming an anti-racist university.

Today, we stand with students who call for recognition of the rights and dignity of Palestinians, and who oppose apartheid in Israel. We call upon the University of California to defend our students’ right to speak truth to injustice.

*  Tony Platt is a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at Berkeley Law’s Center for the Study of Law & Society. Professor Jonathan Simon teaches law and legal studies at Berkeley Law.

A RECKONING

I learned recently from a member of St. John’s Church in Sacramento, California, that St. John’s Council formed a committee to propose and lead repentance and reconciliation programs following its decision to rename a fellowship hall from “Goethe Hall” to “The Gathering Place” and to end financial benefit from a long-standing bequest from C. M. Goethe (1875-1966). The church had delayed the decision to distance itself from the Goethe name for many years, primarily because Charles Matthias’ grandfather, Matthias Goethe, was its founder. St. John’s racial justice ministry helped the Congregation to learn about C. M. Goethe’s affiliation with the rightwing, white supremacist wing of the eugenics movement; to understand the Church’s obligation to acknowledge its relationship with Goethe; and, as a congregation claiming to live God’s Love in the world, to make amends for that affiliation.

The Church’s Committee on Repentance, Reconciliation, & Repair consulted my research on Goethe and the eugenics movement* and asked me to speak at the Church on May 22, 2022. This is the talk that I gave that day.

* Tony Platt, “Engaging The Past: Charles M. Goethe, American Eugenics, and Sacramento State University,” Social Justice 32, 2, 2005; Tony Platt with Cecilia O’Leary, Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, From Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial (Paradigm, 2006).

Thank you for the invitation to participate in your reckoning with the legacies of Charles Goethe. Thank you to the congregation for the privilege of inviting me into this conversation. Thank you to Pastors Frank Espergen, Amy Kienzle, and John Haugh for encouraging us to do justice to history. Thank you to the Committee on Repentance, Reconciliation, & Repair for charting a serious way forward, far beyond tokenism. And thanks to Phoebe DeMund for reading something I wrote about Goethe seventeen years ago and reaching out to me. All my work as an academic – professor at Berkeley, professor here at Sac State, and now a research fellow in Berkeley in the twilight of my career – has been committed to social justice, to doing as well as thinking, to trying to practice what I preach and teach, and to responding to the “call to life” issued by the Movement in the 1960s.

As an activist, I know that making real change is a long journey, so seventeen years is like yesterday. Consider the Civil Rights Movement: it was born in the Civil War in the 1860s, achieved the legal termination of white supremacy a hundred years later, and is still an unfinished struggle as witnessed by the legacies of segregation in housing and education, rollback of voting rights, anti-immigrant misanthropy, and the racist venom that culminated in last week’s massacre in Buffalo.

I commend you for taking on the legacies of Goethe in your church. It’s not an easy process given that it requires excavating your origins story and the narratives of your past and grappling with what it means for a place of community, fellowship, spirituality, respect, and godliness to be associated with a man who hated the majority of humanity.

Some communities are divided over how to address the legacies of founders and benefactors. The arguments go like this:

1 “He did good as well as bad.” At my university, Berkeley, an argument goes on about the legacies of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber who both prerserved many Native languages and also presided over a department that plundered Native grave sites and amassed without permission some 20,000 Native human remains. With Goethe, there is no such dilemma. He campaigned for forced sterilization of poor women and for ending immigration from Mexico and Asia; he was a leader in racial red-lining in Sacramento; he was a founding member of an organization that had close and mutually appreciative ties with racial scientists in Nazi Germany and that was the most important eugenics organization on the West Coast; he self-published his racist and sexist screeds because no publisher would publish them; he gave economic incentives to white students to procreate; he gave millions of dollars to California organizations that turned a blind eye to his well-publicized malevolence; his last charitable act was to send a donation to the Northern League, a European organization working to build “cooperation between all Nordic Peoples,”  predecessors to today’s white supremacists.

2. "He was a man of his times,” he spoke a common language and had no choices. This assumes that there was no debate about what he believed during his lifetime. There was in fact fierce public debate, and he made many choices, as did Sacramento. They both chose the side of inequality and injustice. In 1955, when Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi and Rosa Parks struck to her principles and seat in Alabama, Cal State Sacramento awarded Goethe its first honorary degree in science. In 1962, when the Supreme Court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, the Sacramento branch of the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a sundial and benches in the campus arboretum in memory of Goethe’s wife. In 1965, the year that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Sac State named the new Science building after “Sacramento’s most remarkable citizen."

3. “What is past is past.” In the case of Goethe, I only wish that was true. His ideas and the eugenics movement in which he was an active participant has endured for generations and helped to shape economic and social policies and the way that we think about the world. Goethe and his colleagues, for example, were big fans of what today is known as “great replacement theory,” the idea that immigrants of color and American communities of color are swamping “Anglo-Saxons.”

4. “We can’t change the past.” Yet, we do it all the time personally in how we think about ourselves over a lifetime, how aging affects what is important to us, how we consider and re-consider our parents and ancestors, how we think about and re-think our religious and ethical values. In the same way, history, like memory, is always partial, always in motion, never rests in peace. History, according to historian Raphael Samuel, “is an argument about the past, as well as the record of it, and its terms are forever changing.” Witness how the terms of your conversation about Goethe are changing.

5. "It’s a slippery slope.” If we change our relationship with Goethe, so goes the argument, there is a danger of it becoming a slippery slope, speeding us towards endless investigations and debates. I think of these controversies as an opportunity to think through how we want to name ourselves and whom and what we want to honor. It’s an important and consequential responsibility. In the past, these decisions were made for the most part by unrepresentative elites. Now we have an opportunity to democratize the decisions. I welcome the slippery slope.

In conclusion, let me return to the name of your committee: Repentance, Reconciliation, & Repair.

The process you are involved in is going on all over the country and in many parts of the world: statues being removed from town squares, the names of formerly great men being removed from buildings, and debates about the pros and cons of this reckoning with the past. Here in California, there is a range of action and inaction, from the Huntington Library in San Marino where nothing has been done to address the legacies of Goethe’s colleagues in the Human Betterment Foundation (HBF), an organization that congratulated Nazi Germany on its efforts to reduce society’s “weaklings”; and Berkeley where the University similarly has not yet confronted its eugenics past – its role in honoring two faculty members who were on the governing board of the HBF – or addressed its role in the manufacture and use of atomic weapons against at least 200,00 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; to Caltech where a concerted grassroots effort has successfully forced the university to address the legacies of Robert Millikan, one its founders, a Nobel-prize winning scientist and key member of the HBF; to the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena where the congregation not only faced the legacies of Millikan, one of its founders, but also took reparative action in the present to make amends for the past.

Given the title of your committee, you exemplify that, in the words of Josef Hayim Yerushalmi, “the antonym of forgetting is not remembering, but justice.” I commend you for the care that you are taking with your course of action, refusing to deal with Goethe by administrative fiat or simply by scrubbing his name from a building. The process you are going through – education, debate, and reflection, what I call a reckoning – is to me as important as the outcome because it reflects the seriousness of the issue, because it has implications far beyond Goethe, and because whatever decisions you make will be thought through and hopefully enduring. You will soon be ready to take on the third part of your Committee’s title: Repair and its close sister, Reparations.

What you are going through reminds me of what Yurok elder Walt Lara Sr. calls “a settling up” – a collaborative method of dealing with a Tribe’s internal arguments. It’s a way, he says, “to maintain balance with each other, the environment, and the spiritual energies, to live in harmony with the world.” I’m also reminded of what W. E. B. Du Bois said in 1903 about how the Sorrow Songs helped African Americans to keep going through the very worst of times. Your reckoning with Goethe is like a sorrow song that in the words of Du Bois “breathes a hope and a faith in the ultimate justice of things.”

To inherit the past provides an opportunity to significantly transform it.

I thank you for speaking justice to history and wish you well on your journey.

DOUBLE LIVES

I have deep associations with a photograph that I keep visible on a shelf in my office at home, integrated into family and personal mementos. It’s a publicity shot of a glamorous Lena Horne, signed “To Tony – with good wishes.” I’ve kept it in the same funky plastic frame that I bought when I came to Berkeley from England in 1963. Aside from being star-struck, why do I keep this memento so close to me?

Lena Horne gave a concert in Manchester in the 1950s when I was a teenager and avid autograph collector. My elegant uncle Bertie – named Bertie, not Bertram, never Bert – asked her to sign the photograph for me. He was something of a stage-door Johnny who served as an informal host for visiting entertainers, no doubt in part as a way to have no-strings sex. Married with children and closeted in devoted secrecy when it was illegal to be gay in England, Bertie had to avoid snitches in the city’s underground clubs and keep a straight face in country suburbia, a few blocks from my home. He was no Oscar Wilde: he kept his personal life private, even after his sexuality was decriminalized, even after his divorce.

Many years later, I learned how Lena Horne was picked by music industry moguls to be one of the first cross-over stars, selected because of her light color and great voice, in that order. By the 1950s she was Hollywood famous, though never in a leading role. She got “tired,” she said, “of being typecast as a Negro who stands against a pillar singing a song.” For taking public stands against segregation and racism, she was blacklisted by the Right and feted by the Movement. She sang with Paul Robeson. She appeared with Medgar Evers at a rally in Jackson, Mississippi, a few days before he was assassinated. Her Wikipedia entry credits her as a civil rights activist, as well as a singer, dancer, and actor.

Later in life, Horne talked candidly about the stress of performing as the chosen one and what it took to reconcile her professional and personal lives with her political convictions. After she died in 2010, I clipped an obituary from the New York Times and stuck it behind the photograph. “My identity is very clear to me now,” she said late in her career. “I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become.”

As far as I know, Bertie never talked candidly about what it had been like for him to move back and forth between his respectable and shadowy worlds. “Sitting in my flat alone I seem to have a life consisting of looking back,” he wrote me by email soon after he made his century. But he wasn’t telling.

Admitted to hospital with pneumonia and lung cancer a few days ago, he remained stylish to the end. Asked what treatment options he preferred, he replied: "No pain and a game of bridge please.”

 

The photograph of Lena Horne in its cheap frame stays in my sights because it reminds me of my oblivious teen years, of my uncle leading a double life, even when he wasn’t forced to do so, and of a visionary who risked her good fortune so that future young Lenas and Berties can assert their place in the world.

Lena Horne 1917-2010   Bertie Daniels, 1921 - 2021

 

LEGACIES OF UNCRITICAL RACE THEORY AT BERKELEY*

 

I am glad to see that structural critiques of racism are finally gaining some traction in university curricula and professional training in the United States. It’s been a long wait.

In the fall of 1972, while legal scholars were contemporaneously developing what would become Critical Race Theory, I was co-teaching a course on radical criminology to some six hundred undergraduates at Berkeley. Our curriculum included sections on “crimes of racism,” as well as crimes of imperialism, exploitation, sexism, and survival. Students read about the trial of the Panther 21 and institutional racism in prisons; and watched documentaries on the bombing of Hiroshima and the murder of Fred Hampton. I taught another class on criminal justice racism with David Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois’ stepson, who was then editor of the Black Panther Party’s newspaper.

Not surprisingly, I was not a criminology professor much longer. Informants in my classes reported to the FBI that I had “continually and consistently displayed anti-American ideas” and that I was “one of the first individuals to wear extremely long hair.” Berkeley’s Chancellor, in a confidential memo to a university committee considering my promotion to tenured professor, complained that my political activism had contributed to the “decline in morale” of the local police department and that my scholarship smacked of “Orthodox Marxism of the 1930s.” Moreover, he added, “I do believe some of his colleagues would be somewhat relieved if he weren’t around.” By the mid-1970s, the teaching of radical theories of racism was marginalized in most universities. In Berkeley, the University closed down the School of Criminology.

It would take another forty years for advocates of Critical Race Theory to again carve out a niche in academia. And again it is under relentless attack. There’s a lot of noise these days about how it’s promoting racial discord and generally wrecking the country. Sufficiently demonized to have its own acronym, CRT has replaced affirmative action and political correctness as the Right’s target in the culture wars. “It weaponizes diversity,” says Utah Senator Mike Lee, and turns “college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs.” Opportunistically jumping on the populist bandwagon, Donald Trump accuses CRT of “indoctrinating America’s school children with some of the most toxic and anti-American themes ever conceived.” Its “ridiculous left-wing dogma” promotes “divisive messages [that] verge on psychological abuse.” How dangerous is it, you may ask? “It is a program of national suicide,” replies Trump.

No doubt Lee and Trump have in mind initiatives recently taken by universities, such as UC Berkeley’s promise to become an “anti-racist campus” that draws upon “antiracist frameworks” in teaching and research. With its progressive reputation for social justice activism, Berkeley is always an easy target for the Right, though I’ve not yet encountered any multicultural hordes running rampant on my campus.

For most of its history, from its founding in the 1870s through the 1990s, long before it took tentative steps to incorporate critical race theory into its curriculum, Berkeley was a bastion of uncritical race theory. The self-righteous indignation of leading politicians and literati was resolutely muted when academia nourished scientific racism.

Nobody yelled about disrespect for our ancestors when Berkeley’s first president (1872-1875), Daniel Coit Gilman praised California’s founding fathers for making “this wilderness rejoice and blossom like a rose,” thus erasing thousands of years of Indigenous history prior to genocide. The biblically inspired catchphrase fiat lux,  a regional expression of manifest destiny, is repetitively embedded in the University’s iconography, from its inscription on an arch honoring philanthropist Phoebe Hearst after her death in 1919, to its use as a sign-off in the Chancellor’s messaging today. Testimony to the staying power of fiat lux is former Senator and Republican pundit Rick Santorum’s recent claim to Young America’s Foundation that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American Culture…. We birthed a nation from nothing — I mean, there was nothing here.”

Nobody raised the specter of divisiveness when the university appointed as its third president (1876-1881) John LeConte and his brother Joseph as professor of geology, both unreconstructed racists from a slave-owning family in Georgia and owners of a weapons factory during the Civil War. There was only a slim hope, Joseph Le Conte argued in 1892 in his capacity as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for civilizing the “plastic, docile, imitative Negro.” As for the American Indian, “extermination is unavoidable.”

Nobody registered their concern about cancel culture when the university appointed as its ninth president (1919-1923) David Prescott Barrows, whose experience as General Superintendent of Education in the occupied Philippines left him convinced that Filipinos had an “intrinsic inability for self-governance” and that “the white, or European race, is above all others the great historical race.”

Nobody seemed worried about the dangers of hyphenated Americanism when Berkeley’s most distinguished historian, Herbert Bolton, promoted the global significance of Spain’s colonial ventures, commending its “frontier genius” and efforts to “discipline the Indian in the rudiments of civilized life.” His 1922 textbook for children helped to solidify the myth that Spain’s deadly mission system taught “wild Indians the Christian faith and how to do useful things in the white man’s way.” Nor did university officials express any concern about the possibility of quid pro quo when the King of Spain made Bolton a Commander of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic in 1925.

Nobody charged two of Berkeley’s leading academics – zoologist Samuel Holmes and medical scientist Herbert Evans – with un-Americanism when they joined an organization that publicly praised Hitler’s regime for forcibly sterilizing 200,000 women during its first three years in power. They remained loyal members of the rightwing Human Betterment Foundation from its foundation in 1929 until its dissolution in 1942, nine years after the Nazi government enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (Sterilization Law) and seven years after the publication of the first American Edition of Mein Kampf. “There is a good deal of discussion in Germany over the curtailment of the increase of Poles, Jews, and other elements not in the good graces of the present régime,” wrote Holmes in 1937, two years after the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws. “What the Germans may accomplish – and many of their best minds are giving serious thought to the problem – remains to be seen.” Holmes put his best mind to work in the United States by lobbying for a quota on Mexican immigrants (“the least assimilable of foreign stocks”), advocating financial incentives for white female students and faculty wives to procreate, and helping to make California the country’s leader in forced sterilization. You can hear strong echoes of this reactionary angst in Great Replacement Theory that today is a foundational tenet of rightwing ideology.

The university did more than tolerate Holmes’ fascist-inspired ideology, it also funded and published his extensive Bibliography of Eugenics (1924) and his racist screed, The Negro’s Struggle for Survival, in which the author commended the Ku Klux Klan for promoting the health and welfare of survivors of slavery in the South, no irony intended. To Holmes, “the more primitive race” (Native People) had failed to “adjust itself to a more highly developed social order” and thus “disappeared” because they “remained, in large part, a sort of foreign element in our population.”

Nobody railed about cultural exclusion when Phoebe Hearst bankrolled archaeological expeditions to Egypt, Peru, Mexico, and California that returned to Berkeley with the spoils of mummies, funerary artifacts, and human remains – aptly described by Hazel Carby as “fetishes of conquest.”  During the 20^th century, university officials welcomed the plunder of thousands of Native graves and accumulation of the country’s second largest collection of human bones and crania in the name of “salvage archaeology.”

Nobody decried race-based theories when Edward Gifford, the university’s expert on anthropometry, promoted essentialist quackery about how “the living aborigines of California fall into two main groups, one low-faced, the other high-faced.” His research focused on the measurement of racial differences as indicated by the length and breadth of heads, noses, and ears; the degree of slope in forehead; the axis of nostrils; and the degree to which “the fleshy lower margin of the septum is exposed.” The university rewarded Gifford by publishing his research, putting him in charge of public education about anthropology, promoting him to full professor, and naming a room in his honor after his death in 1959.

In the 1970s and 1980s, while activists all around the country condemned psychologist Arthur Jensen’s arguments about the hereditarian roots of intelligence, the university protected his freedom to peddle updated eugenics while it justified closing down the School of Criminology on the grounds that we had abandoned our “professional mission.”  I don’t remember any administrators suggesting that Jensen’s scholarship represented an attack on American values.

 “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” asked Jensen in his influential 1969 Harvard Educational Review article. Not much, he replied, and not worth social investment in trying to do so. For the next twenty-five years as professor of education at Berkeley, he stuck to his reactionary views about the fixed, genetic nature of intelligence. Moreover, his research boosted the popularity of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s neo-con proposal in The Bell Curve that “it is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived.”

The logic of eugenics that was embedded in the work of the LeConte brothers, David Barrows, Herbert Bolton, Samuel Holmes, Edward Gifford, and Arthur Jensen has had devastating consequences for millions of people: poor women, disproportionately Latina, Native, and African American who were forcibly sterilized; Mexican immigrants who were restricted from entering the United States on racial grounds;  families of color who were tracked into segregated housing and substandard education; people with physical and intellectual disabilities who were denied a right to full lives; and Native People who were represented in popular literature and educational texts as biologically destined to extinction.

The ideas that settler colonialism and capitalism represented a progressive civilization bringing light to the darkness and that social inequality is rooted in biological predisposition shaped public education and everyday commonsense for decades. It lives on, for example, in Trump’s depiction of “American carnage” as inherent in “crime-infested” communities of color. And in police use of the pseudo-diagnosis “excited delirium” to explain why force is necessary to restrain and kill African American men.

*****

In the twilight of my career, I was invited in 2014 to return as a resident scholar to Berkeley, the site of my banishment in the 1970s. It’s good to be back where I started my climb up the academic ladder and to witness the resurrection of efforts to infuse the curriculum with critically informed ideas about race. It’s the least we can do to make up for generations of what Inuit artist David Ruben Piqtoukun calls an “education in forgetting.”

I hope, though, that the university’s anti-racism initiatives also keep in mind one of Critical Race Theory’s central tenets: that racism is systemic and structural, that the past bleeds into the present.  To move forward we need to understand how and why universities such as Berkeley hosted and emboldened pro-racist initiatives for so long.

As I recently walked through the Berkeley campus – past buildings, statues, and plaques that celebrate an American president who authorized the appropriation of Native lands to finance the University of California; that dignify entrepreneurs who built their fortunes from the plunder of war and conquest; and that enshrine academics who polished their careers by making white supremacy respectable – I was reminded of Yurok Judge Abby Abinanti’s admonition that “the hardest mistakes to correct are those that are ingrained.”

* “The Legacies of Un-critical Race Theory at Berkeley” was first published in History News Network, July 25, 2021, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/180783.

"THE WORK SAID WHO I WAS"

 

Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez (1925-2021)

 

      Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martínez’s hybrid name signals a great deal about the diverse contributions of a veteran activist who lived, as she recalled in 1998, through five international wars, six social movements, and seven attempts to build socialism around the world. “The heart just insists on it,” she explained.

      Betita is generally recognized today as a founding member of the Chicano movement and Latinx feminism. But long before she embraced her Latina identity, she was also a committed political activist, with roots in international leftism, as well as a fan of the Beatles.

     Betita Martínez grew up between the world wars in the white middle-class suburbs of segregated Washington, D. C.  Her father, Manuel Guillermo Martínez worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown. Her blue-eyed, American mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, taught advanced high school Spanish. Groomed for the fast track to professional success, she felt like “a freak brown child” in Chevy Chase’s “never-never land.”

    She was the first Latina at Swarthmore College, where she was deeply and equally affected by news of Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe and of American war crimes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Graduating with honors in 1946 and in pursuit of a career in the “Eurocentric publishing world,” Betita Martínez became Elizabeth “Liz” Sutherland (adopting her mother’s vaguely British middle name) and plunged into the post-war ferment of New York’s cultural scene. She worked as a clerk, translator, and researcher at the United Nations (1946-1954); an administrative assistant to Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-1958); an editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-1964); and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1964).

       During this period, Liz had one foot in the world of upwardly mobile diplomats and the scribbling class, the other in the demimonde of outsiders, leftists, and Lower East Side rebels. At Simon and Schuster, she used her insider status to lobby for publication of an extraordinary photographic record of The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964). As a reporter for the Nation, she sympathetically covered the “youngest revolution” in Cuba, the struggle for civil rights from the frontlines of the Deep South, and the “great stupidity, not to mention immorality” of the arms race.

    In the early 1960s, Elizabeth hobnobbed with cutting edge artists and writers (including Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Diane di Prima), moving easily between the “world of Beat poets, junkie painters, and LSD experiments” and Fifth Avenue soirées hosted by chic patrons. This ability to function in very different social worlds would serve her well later in life when she had to fundraise for leftist causes and translate radical rhetoric into palatable liberalism for middle-class audiences.

    As a woman who clearly looked Latina, Elizabeth Sutherland had to work furiously hard to be noticed and taken seriously by New York’s male, white literati. Unusually for somebody still in her 30s, she cultivated the literary talent of an accomplished editor, the eye of a rigorous graphic designer, and the ability to write passionate prose in sharply chiseled English.

    Her productivity was prodigious. Between 1960 and 1963, she reviewed movies for Horizon and Film Quarterly, reported on her visit to Cuba in the Nation and Manchester Guardian, wrote about a labor dispute for the Nation, edited a book of Ingmar Bergman screenplays, translated a French novel, reported in Evergreen Review on her trip to Moscow to interview leading Russian poets, edited a SNCC pamphlet illustrated with Danny Lyon photos, wrote a hilarious column for the National Guardian about her appearance before HUAC, and sent a letter to the New York Times criticizing their coverage of the state of Soviet theatre ­– and  still found time to do political work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and Friends of SNCC, and endorse Robert Williams’ advocacy of self-defense in North Carolina’s Black communities.

    In 1965, making a shift from reporting to joining the Movement, Elizabeth quit her job at the Nation and became director of SNCC’s New York office. She had already committed herself to SNCC’s politics, serving as its representative in a 1964 Wall Street coalition organized to protest Chase Manhattan’s involvement in South Africa’s apartheid regime. It was here that she dazzled a young Mike Davis, then a political neophyte in New York’s SDS office, with her tactical savvy and snazzy outfits.

    When she wasn’t getting the word out and raising half a million dollars, she was on the road in the South. For at least a year, SNCC offered Elizabeth “a sense of effectiveness and a minimum of lies, maximum of truth.” She didn’t grapple then “with my particular identity, with being half Mexican and half white,” she recalled many years later. “The work said who I was.”

       Beginning in 1967, a conjuncture of three pivotal events propelled Elizabeth Sutherland in new directions: SNCC’s turn to black nationalism, the compelling presence of a radical feminist tendency in New York, and the rise of the Chicano movement in New Mexico. She emerged from this political moment with a new identity and a new name.

    Elizabeth quickly moved from a central position in SNCC to the status of an outsider. The organization had, as she put it, “an identity crisis” and decided it “should be an all-black organization.” Publicly, she acknowledged the strategic necessity for nationalism. Privately, she seethed at being “classified as white” and told in effect, “Get out.” She drafted “Some Thoughts on the ‘Black-White’ Issue” and, for the first time, signed it Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez. “That’s my full name up there,” she wrote, testing her new identity.

    For a while feminism filled the space once occupied by SNCC. She “looked hard” at the sexism within the Movement and didn’t like what she saw: images of “our women/ in postures of maternity, sadness, devotion/ tears for the lost husband or son/ our women, nothing but shadows/reflections of someone else’s existence/ BASTA!”

    With other refugees from SNCC, Elizabeth joined the New York Radical Women’s collective – a group that included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone ­­– and with Carol Hanisch (instigator of the celebrated protest of the Miss America pageant in 1968) wrote “Women of the World Unite – We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Men!” for the first issue of Notes from the First Year.  From that moment on, there was no separating the political struggle against racism and sexism. “The two cannot be honestly divided,” she believed.

    “I am lonely,” she wrote in 1967 in one of many memos to herself. “It’s time for me to search for my identity and go home to my Mexican-Americans,” even though by this time in her life she had little in common with Mexico, her father’s birthplace. In 1968, attracted by the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, an organization led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, Betita Martínez moved to New Mexico to support the Alianza’s struggle to recover lands that had once been communally owned. She arrived, she admitted, “totally ignorant of the Southwest, almost totally ignorant of Chicano culture and life.” But as a voracious reader and quick learner, it didn’t take her long to become deeply knowledgeable about the Southwest and its history, and to feel a cultural connection that had eluded her all her life. She was 42 years old. “The ground of my life was shifting, stretching. A voice inside of me said, You can be Betita Martínez here.”

    Along with Beverly Axelrod, a movement attorney, Betita created El Grito del Norte (Cry of the North), a newspaper that included favorable and in-person coverage of Vietnam, Cuba, and China that left no doubt about its left politics. Betita herself was the first Chicano organizer to visit North Vietnam in 1970.

    As Elizabeth Sutherland became Betita Martínez, she made sure that issues of gender were not put on the back burner. She spoke out against sexism and homophobia within the Chicano movement. “The super-macho,” she wrote, “is haunted by the need to prove his manhood.” In 1970, her statement on “Colonized Women: The Chicana” was published in Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful, an anthology that became required reading for a new generation of feminists.

    When El Grito ended in 1973, Betita moved to Albuquerque and with a group of like-minded leftists established the Chicano Communications Center, a Marxist collective. Leading a demonstration at the courthouse in Albuquerque, Betita “exuded an air of serene authority that I had rarely seen in a woman,” recalls Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. But her new political home was short-lived. The Center degenerated into internecine battles, wrecked by “vanguardism and sectarianism.” She left New Mexico in 1974, politically defeated and personally devastated. As a single parent of Tessa (after her divorce from writer-activist Hans Koning) and a cosmopolitan leftist “with a horrible amount of education and verbal skills,” she felt uneasy with young working-class families, deeply rooted in local communities.

       In 1974, Betita made the third and final major geographical move in her life, this time to the San Francisco Bay Area, a site of leftist ferment. By now she was a committed Marxist, looking for an organization that would transcend identity politics, take women seriously, and demand full-time commitment. Her new organizational home was the Democratic Workers Party (DWP), a Leninist organization led by women, with a world-systems framework and a wide variety of projects. Betita quickly moved into a leadership position and kept up a furious pace of activity. She designed and edited the party’s newspaper and ran for Governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1982.

       By 1984, the DWP, as well as the rest of the Marxist-Leninist left in the United States, had imploded, leaving in its wake a sense of impotency and bitterness among former cadre. When Betita finally slowed down enough to think deeply about how she had spent the last decade of her life, she realized that “in the name of fighting for freedom, many left collectivities organize with great un-freedom. Experience indicates that democratic centralism tends to become all centralism and no democracy.”

        Most people at Betita’s age, then close to 60, would be satisfied with four decades of political activism, punishing work routines, and almost no time for a personal life. But there was no stopping her now. She helped to build new organizations – The Institute for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco – and new publications – CrossRoads magazine and War Times. Still ahead were five books, more than one hundred published articles, not to mention countless conferences, guest lectures, and public speeches. She also returned to grassroots activism, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, saying “NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness.”

    Without a university base or philanthropic support, she accomplished what most academics never do in a lifetime: write several books that leave a deep impact on readers searching for socially relevant, well researched, and thoughtful analysis.

    As a writer, always a writer, Elizabeth Sunderland and Betita Martínez established a unique voice. Her 1965 book, Letters from Mississippi, was an important chronicle of the struggle for racial equality. Her first-person account of revolutionary Cuba (The Youngest Revolution, 1969) had an impact on activists such as Angela Davis, who appreciated her anti-imperialist perspective and “careful eye.” Her two books 500 Years of Chicano History (1976) and 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History (2008) resonated with a new generation of Latinx activists, whom she tirelessly mentored as though their lives depended on it. 

    In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, but not the private pension, home ownership, and other perks that typically crown an academic career. Comrades and friends returned her devotion to the Movement by establishing a fund for her health and basic needs.

    During the last decade of her activism, before the limitations of age and illness took their toll, Betita began to look more deeply and honestly into the self-inflicted wounds that can’t simply be blamed on “the man.” Back in the 1960s, she recognized that “the enemy is within as well as without,” but she kept this concern private. It troubled her that “sometimes/in this here movement/you go down, down, down/dragged by the smallness of people,” but she was careful then not to wash the Movement’s dirty laundry in public.

    Later in life, returning to her feminist roots, she felt a duty to speak out on these issues. For too long, she said, the Chicano movement was seen as a subsidiary of the African American movement; that women in SNCC and Chicano organizations were typically considered subordinate to “male warriors” and assigned housewifely duties; that in the name of fighting for a “humanist society,” revolutionary Marxist groups treated its cadres callously and other progressive organizations with sectarian venom. While she gave all to her political family, she regretted “neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter.”

       Betita’s extraordinary experiences in five decades of movements for social justice are a window into the American left, with all its passion, sacrifices, missteps, and contradictions. Her own political worldview was a complicated mix of Leninism, civil libertarianism, and populism. She joined vanguard organizations in the belief that structural change in the “belly of the beast” is only possible with steeled cadre in hierarchical, quasi-military organizations leading the way. Yet, her experiences in these organizations left her highly critical of the lack of internal democracy and abuse of cadres. She defended communist and socialist regimes in the hope that one day the world system would tip in their favor. Yet, there wasn’t one state socialist regime that she really admired. Visiting Cuba soon after the revolution, she felt a “unity with the Cuban night,” not Fidel, and was glad to see that a “tolerant spirit” still prevailed, including the showing of The 400 Blows and Brigitte Bardot movies. In the USSR in 1962, she hung out with dissident poets rather than party apparatchiks. In 1989, she welcomed the pro-democracy movement in China, siding with demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

       Despite long bouts of personal depression and political despondency – “feet chained deep in shit and no wings,” as she wrote in a 1971 poem – Betita retained an affinity for the singing landscape, the road that glitters, and optimism of the heart. “Hey,” she once responded to my political melancholy, “I just finished watching a documentary about the Donner Party and, believe me, things could be worse.”

    Comrades remember her dressed to the nines in her mini-skirts and bold fashion sense in New York; her silver accessories, bright red lipstick, and Go-Go boots in New Mexico; dancing, swilling gin Martinis, and having a ruckus of a good time in California. She was the toughest leftist I’ve ever known, never without a sheaf of leaflets, but she was also delighted by how the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night celebrated the “sweet parade” of life – “parading the streets, trailing their coats, bowling along and living!”

ACKNOWLEDGING LAND & MUCH MORE AT BERKELEY *

We need to listen to the sound of history.

 

“when the strongest winds blow, the skulls

will rattle wildly, bone against metal,

a crack and chatter of bone against metal,

the true sound of history, this metal striking bone.”

                             (Jim Harrison, 2019)[1]

 

A land acknowledgement is especially important for the University of California. It’s an important first step in coming to terms with a tragic past, the sound of metal striking bone.

It should be an important ritual at the beginning of every new class and every campus event, in the same way that our syllabus routinely informs students about wellness and mental health resources. It should become as familiar as “stumbling stones” in Germany are an everyday reminder of the Nazi holocaust.

We have a responsibility to express this acknowledgement because California and its institutions in particular do such a poor job of doing so.

Most people on campus have no idea about the racist foundations of the University, that it was born in bloodshed, genocide, and war in the 1860s and 1870s.

Most people on campus do not know that we are home to one of the largest, unsanctified, and desecrated cemeteries of ancestors in the country.

In addition to land grabs, there are many actions, omissions, and misanthropic ideas that the University needs to acknowledge:

How the University’s initial development relied on investments derived from ownership of 150,000 acres that had been stolen from tribes in the Central Valley and given to the state of California via the federal 1862 Morrill Act. In 1889, for example, more than 30 percent of the University’s operating expenses were derived from Morrill Act income.[2] This needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

How, in 1873, when the University opened its campus on land that is now known as Berkeley, it moved here because of the importance of Strawberry Canyon and Strawberry Creek that once was an important flowing body of fresh water that ran from the Berkeley hills to the Bay. Its link to the Sacramento River and its proximity to high ground and a deep-water estuary below made it ideal for long-term habitation. Here, there were abundant deer, elk, bear, and mountain lions in the hills, and salmon and trout were available in the creek. The waterway nourished tens of Ohlone settlements that flourished here for maybe as long as five thousand years. Here on campus, beginning in 1879, the University reported finding Native artifacts. It cannot plead ignorance. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

How from the late 19^th century through the 1960s, the University primarily through its Anthropology department and museum, but with the active support and participation of many Berkeley faculty and the University administration, excavated hundreds of Native village sites and plundered at least 10,000 graves and ancestors, and hundreds of thousands of cultural artifacts throughout the state without permission, without consent, without dignity, thus adding immense sorrow to the desperate lives of the survivors of genocide. And how it proudly showed off its plunder of body parts to Life magazine in 1948. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

How leading academics at Berkeley played an important role in developing racist theories of human societies: reinforcing the prejudice that California Indians were an inferior racial stock that had “disappeared” naturally; promoting the myth that California Indians had failed to resist and had actively collaborated in their own demise; and contributing to public amnesia about the genocide that decimated Native communities in the second half of the 19^th century. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

How today, thirty years after passage of NAGPRA, the University has only repatriated ten percent of 10,000 Native remains and has stonewalled Tribes seeking repatriation of their ancestors. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

How today, the University continues to minimize the living presence of Ohlone peoples and fails to engage in consultation with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

How the University has buried its sorrowful past in meticulous forgetting that contributes to a hostile racial environment that persists today. This too needs to be acknowledged, and not only as a symbolic gesture.

The University’s acknowledgment of its responsibility for the true sound of history, this metal striking bone, would be an important first step.

Then, and only then, will we be able to move on to the next step: how to do justice to the truth.

* Talk given on October 12, 2020, Indigenous Peoples Day, at forum at Berkeley, organized by Native American Law Students Association. My thanks to NASLA for inviting me to participate.

[1]  Jim Harrison, “The Brand New Statue of Liberty,” in Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems, edited by Joseph Bednarik, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019, 118. Thanks to Peter Nabokov for bringing this poem to my attention.

[2]  Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News 52, 4, April 2020, 32-45, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/print_view.

WHAT'S IN AN UN-NAMING? THE CASE OF BERKELEY'S KROEBER HALL *

    I welcome the news that the Berkeley campus has joined the un-naming movement. It provides us with an opportunity to learn about histories we’ve forgotten and to make the honoring of spaces and places into a democratic process rather than a done deal decided by elites in back rooms.

    John Boalt, the 19^th century anti-Chinese crusader, is already banished from Berkeley’s law school walls. The University is likely to follow the example of a local elementary school and remove the name of John LeConte, an unreconstructed Southern racist, from the building that houses the physics department. 

    Next on the list is anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960), after whom Kroeber Hall is named. He didn’t campaign to restrict immigration to the United States on the basis of race, and he wasn’t a white supremacist. But he was the key academic in a department and museum that rose to fame – literally and scientifically – on the bodies of the Native dead. 

    Kroeber’s reputation in anthropology rests upon his prodigious scholarship, his success in building Berkeley’s department of anthropology into a nationally ranked program, and his documentation of the cultural experiences of California Indians prior to Spanish colonialism and American genocide. Kroeber supported Native land claims, for which the Council of California Indians acknowledged the role he had played in the struggle “for long delayed justice.”

     To most California Tribes and Native activists, especially those in the Bay Area, however, Kroeber’s legacy is more bitter than sweet.

     Kroeber failed in his responsibility to speak out publicly about the genocide that followed the Gold Rush. “What happened to the California Indians following 1849 – their disruption, losses, sufferings, and adjustments – fall into the purview of the historian,” he wrote in 1954, “rather than the anthropologist whose prime concern is the purely aboriginal, the uncontaminatedly native.” The transformation of everyday life after contact was traumatic, Kroeber conceded, but, he added, “it is not gone into here.” It wasn’t that he didn’t know. He just didn’t go into it.

      One consequence of this moral cowardice was that until the 1960s a crudely racist imagery about California Indians dominated public discourse in the state, making it easier to frame their near extermination in the imagery of natural history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of a planned human intervention. Many people hold Kroeber accountable because he had resources and authority to influence public opinion. Of course, one person, even Kroeber, did not wield such power, but he became the personification of meticulous amnesia. Unlike his widow Theodora Kroeber, who spoke out against the genocide, and his colleague Robert Heizer, who at the end of his career issued a mea culpa for his role in treating California’s Tribal peoples as “non-persons,” Kroeber kept his silence.

     As a core faculty member of Berkeley’s department of anthropology (1901-1946) and as director of the anthropology museum (1925-1946), Kroeber oversighted the University’s collection of more than ten thousand Native human remains that it plundered from Native graveyards, and tens of thousands Native artifacts that were excavated from graves or bought cheaply from the desperate survivors of genocide. The University backed up Kroeber’s collecting frenzy and in 1948 proudly showed off to Life magazine its “bone collection [that] has filled two museums and overflows into the Campanile.”

    I’ve recently read hundreds of Berkeley’s archaeological reports. Not once have I come across an account that treats the excavated as other than specimens for research. No prayers are spoken, no rituals practiced, no indication that the living and the dead share a common humanity.

    Kroeber failed to document how Native peoples survived against all odds and lived to fight another day. Activists looking for inspirational accounts of struggle and resistance find little solace in Kroeber’s work, which has a tendency to be nostalgic for the good old days rather than forward-looking.

    Kroeber was not particularly interested in the cultures of local Bay Area Tribes, reporting that they had made “an unfavorable impression on “early voyagers” as “dark, dirty, squalid, and apathetic.” Moreover, he concluded in 1925 that the Bay Area Indians were “extinct as far as all practical purposes are concerned.”

    Walking around the Berkeley campus, it is easy to get the impression that the Ohlone are extinct. A plaque at the university’s entrance acknowledges that a Spanish expeditionary force set up camp here in 1772. There are no plaques to mark the settlements of people who lived in this area a few thousand years earlier. The football stadium commemorates faculty, staff, and students who died during World War I. There is no memorial to the thousands of Ohlone who lived and died in this region. A graceful archway celebrates the life of Phoebe Hearst whose philanthropy funded the excavation of Native graves. There is no comparable recognition of the thousands of people who were dug up from their graves in the name of science and “salvage anthropology.”

    Today, the lineal descendants of the Verona Band of Mission Indians and other Ohlone peoples in the Bay Area are asserting their right to federal tribal sovereignty and to reclaim their ancestral lands, cultural artifacts, and the remains of their dead that are among the nine thousand still held by the University. 

    We should take advantage of this un-naming opportunity to honor the people who made Kroeber’s professional success possible and who are un-remembered in the university’s landscape.

 

*  A longer, documented version is available from Tony Platt: [email protected]

SHINE A LIGHT ON POLICE FUNDING

The movement to defund the police in the United States should be taken seriously. It urges us to try something that has never been tried on a national scale: question the assumptions of a policing goliath that requires almost five times as many employees as the nation’s social workers; and imagine a society without  systemic inequality and injustice that does not need a policing, guarding, and security force of at least 4.3 million.

In addition to demanding a massive reduction in police forces and a transfer of resources to public services, we should also demand transparency about how the police are funded and equipped. To fundamentally change the funding of policing requires that we know who foots the bill and who is on the payroll.

Given the inflammatory rhetoric and policy debates devoted to the “crime problem,” government should keep us informed and current about the number of police employees, the cost of policing, and who does the work of policing. Our government fails on all accounts. Police departments are not even mandated to report to the U. S. Department of Justice how and why they kill on average one thousand people every year.

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics used to be a barely adequate source of up to date information, but it is no longer even that since the Trump administration drastically cut its funding and politicized its leadership.

To figure out what policing costs requires demystifying streams of national funding and tracking intra-governmental transfers of equipment, weapons, and technology. It is not enough to be familiar with only local budgets because the police receive a considerable amount of funding, as well as their marching orders, from Congress and the federal departments of Homeland Security and Justice.

National political initiatives make a significant impact on policing. To Lyndon Johnson, the police were “frontline soldiers” in the War on Crime; Richard Nixon elevated Law and Order into a national ideological slogan and rallied his base to turn back “the wave of crime”; during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the FBI’s budget almost doubled; by the time that Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the New Democrats also had taken the low road to demagoguery and passed legislation that funded 100,000 more police and slashed welfare programs.

Private security workers must be included in the count and cost. They outnumber public police by more than 25 percent and perform most of the same functions as urban cops, either as subcontracted by government agencies or as the direct employees of industries, shopping malls, and middle-class communities. In times of social upheavals, such as tribal opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and today’s protests against police racism, they are routinely mobilized to supplement local and state police and sheriff’s departments. 

No centralized source of information exists for the number of private security personnel, nor for keeping track of the companies that benefit from contracts for security-related products and services that cost more than government expenditures on criminal justice operations nationally. The corporate-security complex with its dangerous “acquisition of unwarranted influence… in the councils of government” is the latest reincarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.

We activist researchers do not operate totally in the dark.

We know that municipal governments have increasingly sacrificed social services for policing. The cost to cities of police protection almost tripled from the 1980s to the 2000s; and local spending on policing, adjusted for inflation, went from $29.3 billion in 1972 to $84.1 billion in 2012.

Since the mid-1950s, when criminal justice expenditures at all levels of government constituted about one-half of one percent of the GNP, the carceral state has persistently increased its share of the public coffers, with policing and security the primary beneficiary. By 1974, the police received 57 percent of the country’s $15 billion criminal justice budget, eight times the amount they received a decade earlier. Since 2002 the Department of Homeland Security has sent billions of dollars to regional and local governments for “terrorism prevention.”

Then there are the many known unknowns. We can only speculate about what it costs federal agencies to subsidize local policing via special grants and materiel. Moreover, some important parts of national funding are a mystery, including the undisclosed costs of covert operations by intelligence agencies and how much the State Department spends on training foreign police forces.

To be successful in achieving structural reforms at the local level will require cutting ties with federal agencies that have framed and subsidized the military model of professional policing since the early 20^th century, from J. Edgar Hoover’s doubts in the 1920s about the “Negro’s fitness for self-government” to Donald Trump’s commitment to make the United States into “a country of law and order.”

Local activists should urge progressive Democrats in Congress to add another demand to the Justice in Policing Act: Make transparent how the federal government funds, equips, and arms local policing.

As Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader, used to say about racism: Let’s bring this out to the light. Then we can see what we’re up against.