What is your opinion of the allegedly anonymous letter from a UCB History prof?

[ScaredAdjunct]

Colleagues, (sorry if this has been discussed; I don't see it) the following letter is circulated on Twitter, allegedly from a UCB History prof. I am not familiar with Tom Sowell's work, and Wilfred Reilly's interview on Fox News makes me very uncomfortable, but regardless of the letter's choice of quotations, I'm afraid the orthodoxy it addresses is very real as in the mob lynchings and cancel culture online and offline. Your thoughts (especially from the historians)?  Is it written by someone like Candace Owens or is it possibly real?

Before you read it, if you ever wonder, UCB History had already denounced the letter:

An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member. We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.

This is the letter:

Dear profs X, Y, Z,

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

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

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

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

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

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews.

None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

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

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

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. No discussion is permitted for non-black victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of non-black violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd.

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

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

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

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race,
all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called 'race hustlers': hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship. Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

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

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors. And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise.

Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

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

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

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

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party's uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.

I condemn the manner of George Floyd's death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end. I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.

[Parasaurolophus]

My opinion is that it's concern-trolling, and that its reductio is self-reductio-ing.

[polly_mer]

My bet is this isn't a history faculty member but someone from a field that tends to sigh exasperatedly about academia's focus on very narrow aspects of diversity that is US-centric.

I know I tend to sigh that way, especially in the past month while residing in a place that has far more tribal folks than African Americans and the few African Americans are transplants with STEM graduate degrees.

[writingprof]

My opinion is that it's obviously accurate and thus must be destroyed.  No one will bother to explain why in anything other than the most abstract terms (e.g., "This goes against our values").  Happily, the people who destroy it and unearth and destroy its author today will themselves be destroyed by the mob tomorrow.

[marshwiggle]

The letter is well written, and it certainly would be dangerous for somone to own, but unless UCB History has a bunch of faculty members of colour, it would be too easy for the writer to be outed if it were actually someone from that department. I'd guess from some nearby department, faculty, or institution to get a degree or two more of safety.

It definitely sounds like an academic though.

[mahagonny]

The letter is well written, and it certainly would be dangerous for somone to own, but unless UCB History has a bunch of faculty members of colour, it would be too easy for the writer to be outed if it were actually someone from that department. I'd guess from some nearby department, faculty, or institution to get a degree or two more of safety.

It definitely sounds like an academic though.

A bit wordy..

Even if the letter isn't real, the condemning of it by the UCB History Department is almost certainly from the tenured faculty, who may not even know what the untenured or never-to-be-tenured teaching faculty think of the situation, yet purport to speak for them. If that is the case then the department does not value diversity of opinion as they aren't making use of the diversity they already have. Adjuncts are slightly less liberal than the tenured by the way.

I'm wondering now if should join the zoom platform meetings this Friday to observe the day of reflection (Juneteenth) that the college and its Office of Diversity and Inclusion recommend. I don't have any desire to. I don't necessarily like their taking it for granted that Black Lives Matter is our new guiding light, and I don't think the atmosphere is tolerant. But I wonder if showing up for the service and taking communion with everyone is unofficially a condition for getting my courses to run in the fall. Everything's up in the air as far as reappointment. I have to rewrite all my syllabi. Diversity and Inclusion office is a distraction. Wish they'd leave me alone!

[Hibush]

It definitely sounds like an academic though.

Surely by now one of Cal's digital humanists has run an AI textual analysis to identify the author.

[mamselle]

I wonder if the OP is the author, or a supporter, and is using the fora to circulate their views directly, i.e., getting them out in view by requesting feedback.

It might not be so.

But it seems possible.

M.

[marshwiggle]

I wonder if the OP is the author, or a supporter, and is using the fora to circulate their views directly, i.e., getting them out in view by requesting feedback.

It might not be so.

But it seems possible.

M.

Why would that matter?

FWIW, I had already read it elsewhere.

[spork]

tl;dr

[riverscuomo]

I read about the first half of it, then started to glaze over. The writer does not know their social science on the topics they're talking about: for example, you wouldn't sincerely go on about differences in crime rates between racial groups without knowing that these differences are mainly attributable to economic resources, and thus racism really is the root of the problem (there is a vast literature in the social sciences and history on how White folks have plundered Black folks in the United States). It's a garbage argument, though I am uncomfortable with (presumably tenured) academics being fired for speaking their minds.

[nescafe]

It was windy. Among other things.

[ScaredAdjunct]

My opinion is that it's obviously accurate and thus must be destroyed.  No one will bother to explain why in anything other than the most abstract terms (e.g., "This goes against our values").  Happily, the people who destroy it and unearth and destroy its author today will themselves be destroyed by the mob tomorrow.

I specialize in a part of history wherein what you said tragically happened. I dare not think how work will be like in the following few years after reading all the new directives of my fields' major organizations. Life will never be the same.

[Hegemony]

It's not well-informed, but it's hard to say whether that's because it's not by an academic, or whether that's because it's by an academic with a bee in his bonnet. It mischaracterizes a number of points, setting up straw men and then knocking them down as if to say, "Nobody's ever thought of my simple but logical objections before! And now suddenly the situation is straightforward!"

There are people who launch this kind of simplistic argument on both sides. That (in my view) one side is more justified than the other does not mean that everyone who speaks on behalf of that side is well-informed, careful, and logical. And that's true of this letter as well.

[mamselle]

I specialize in a part of history wherein what you said tragically happened.

OK, given that, I understand your point in posting better, and rescind my projected opinion above (NB: things like that do happen here from time to time),

(I also refute the proferred affirmation of its accuracy by the poster at 20:28:16.)

OP: Is your moniker tied to the situation itself?

As in, are you feeling threatened in some particular way by the letter's contents or existence?

I'm sorry if that's the case. That's a very hard thing to deal with.

M.