CU Department of Ethnic Studies' ill-concealed mission:
To cultivate a new generation of degreed activists to
carry forth their claims about the inherent malevolence
and racism of American culture.
[Sounds Anti-American to Me]
Attack of the Churchill Clones
By Jacob Laksin and Steven Vincent
March 17, 2005
Overwhelming public pressure may have compelled
Ward Churchill to resign as chair of the Ethnic Studies
Department at the Colorado University at Boulder (CU),
but the dustup whipped up by the Indian-impostor cum
classroom-radical refuses to settle. Witness the antics
of the new chair of the department, associate professor
Emma Perez.
No sooner had news of Churchill's extremist record come
to national attention, than Perez emerged as one of his
earliest - and most fanatical - defenders. Writing in
the radical leftist web magazine Counterpunch in
February 2005, Perez advanced her view that the
critical opposition to Churchill's abhorrent opinions
evidenced a neo-conservative putsch aimed at taking
over the University of Colorado: "We've done some
preliminary research and analysis and it's become clear
exactly what's at stake and what we're up against.
CU-Boulder has been made the national frontline of the
neocon battle for dominance in academe," Perez
declared. For good measure, Perez hinted that criticism
of Churchill was motivated by racism, asserting that
"[t]here are faculty who have problems with his being
American Indian".
Perez notably declined to identify any of these faculty
members. But she nevertheless spared no effort to
rehabilitate Churchill's extremist name. Introducing
Churchill at a speech at the University of Colorado
shortly after he resigned as chair, Perez offered a
tribute to the embattled professor that cast indirect
light on the pervasive radicalism of the Department of
Ethnic Studies. "We're a small department, Ethnic
Studies, we're a small unit, but we're all very good
scholars, and Ward is certainly one of those," Perez
said, adding, "I want the media to look around and see
what kind of support there is for Ward Churchill."
Perez had it quite right. Even as much of the country,
including the administrative leadership at the
University of Colorado, was up in arms over l'affaire
Churchill, the Department of Ethnic Studies acted as
the academic fraud's personal cheering section, forming
a radical Praetorian Guard around their scandal-plagued
colleague.
That is hardly a coincidence. As it happens, the
department's faculty is cut from the same leftist cloth
as Churchill. And investigation into the backgrounds of
some of the other academics comprising the department
makes clear that Indian-aspirant Ward Churchill is only
the tip of a radical teepee.
Take, for instance, Natsu Taylor Saito. A professor of
law at Georgia State University and an associate
professor at the Department of Ethnic Studies, Saito is
not only Churchill's wife; she is also wed to many of
Churchill's extremist ideas. Borrowing a leaf from her
husband's polemical corpus, Saito has on numerous
occasions condemned early American settlers for having
carried out "genocidal policies" against American
Indians. However, as is the case with her husband,
Saito provides no factual evidence to buttress the
incendiary charges, which are flatly rejected by
serious historians.
And Saito's radical resume extends beyond her
Churchill-worthy assaults on the historical record.
Active in the Georgia State Bar, Saito also serves on
the Lawyers' Committee of the American Civil Liberties
Union. Her views of legal issues bear the unmistakable
stamp of her leftist politics. For example, she has
relentlessly attacked the Patriot Act. But while some
critics of the act oppose it on the stated grounds that
it excessively impinges on American democratic norms,
Saito's opposition flows from her radical belief that
those norms are not worth safeguarding. Saito
crystallized this belief starkly in a February 25, 2004
speech denouncing the Patriot Act, in which she asked,
"[I]s this the kind of democracy we want to be
defending?" Saito’s answer was a definitive no.
Brushing aside the notion that the Patriot Act could be
a sensible response to actual national security threats
during wartime, Saito insisted that it was born of the
bigotry of American lawmakers. As Saito explained:
"Now, we see anyone who can be associated with
brown-skinned terrorists by virtue of religion or
national origin being treated as terrorists themselves.
.... And this new 'threat' is used, in turn, to justify
the invasion of Iraq, where a country of brown-skinned
Others has been declared a threat to national security
.... and the U.S. is in the process of dispossessing
these people of their land and natural resources."
Saito's disdain for the Patriot Act was equaled only by
her contempt for the U.S.-led "war on terror," which,
she argued, was fought primarily for the benefit of "a
few large corporations and their stockholders".
The sine qua non of the Ethnic Studies department is
propagating the radical dogma that U.S. society is
discriminatory toward minorities. Saito, for her part,
is singularly engaged with the topic. For instance,
Saito has brought her legal expertise to bear in the
defense Leonard Peltier. A convicted murderer serving
out a lifetime sentence in a Kansas penitentiary,
Peltier has become a favorite cause of leftist
activists, including Ward Churchill, who maintain
against all evidence that he is a "political prisoner"
jailed on account of his Indian American heritage. No
mere well-wisher for Peltier's cause, Saito also serves
as a board member on the felon's defense
committee. Saito also carries on the battle against
discrimination in her writings, which include
discussions of reparations for African-Americans and
the plight of descendents of black Seminole Indians.
Saito summed up her position on these issues during an
appearance at a Denver college, wherein she dilated on
her focus on "the creation of legal discrimination and
the maintenance of those structures that perpetuate
this domination in the context of white supremacy,
paying particular attention to how it relates to the
U.S. colonialist order". Saito’s current preoccupation
is Arab-Americans. In the aftermath of the World Trade
Center attack, for example, she wrote an article for
the Asian Law Journal entitled "Symbolism Under Siege:
Japanese-American Redress and the 'Racing' of
Arab-Americans as 'Terrorists'," in which she
tendentiously likened the post-911 attitudes toward
Arab-Americans to the World War II-era internment of
the Japanese-Americans.
Only too happy to enlist the law in the service of her
political passions, Saito is not averse to breaking it
when it runs afoul of her radical activism. Among other
things, Saito shares her husband’s avidity for trashing
holiday celebrations. Last October, Saito, together
with Churchill and some 230 radical protesters, was
arrested for disrupting a Columbus Day parade in
Denver. The husband-and-wife activist team, ever ready
to assume the mantle of First Amendment martyrs,
apparently claimed that a day honoring the explorer was
tantamount to a celebration of "genocide", making
sabotage the only option. They were acquitted in January.
Equaling Saito and Churchill in her radical fervor is
Elisa Facio. An associate professor in the department
of Chicana/Chicano Studies, a sub-section at CU’s
department of Ethnic Studies, Facio is no stranger to
leftist activism. Chief among Facio's academic
interests is what she calls "Chicana scholarship", a
leftist-feminist shorthand for the theory, of which
Facio is a committed exponent, that Chicana women are
habitually oppressed within American society.
To the untrained eye, Facio seems an unlikely champion
of this theory. Born into a family of migrant workers
in Washington State, Facio managed to graduate high
school, attend Santa Clara University, then go on to
earn a doctorate in sociology from the University of
California at Berkeley. She has since won numerous
awards and fellowships. In view of these
accomplishments, the Chicana-theory assertion that
Facio's career has suffered as a consequence of the
racism, sexism and class stratification supposedly
entrenched in American society does not survive serious
reflection. Indeed, it is not to overstate matters to
suggest that Facio is actually a beneficiary of
America's socially fluid, relatively color-blind society.
Not that Facio sees it this way. As she explains in her
faculty biography, "Chicana scholarship reveals our
struggles as Chicanas in the United States, and
expresses in a society which attempts to render us
invisible". Yet Facio freely allows that this brand of
scholarship does not draw on a sound body of academic
study, but is instead informed by the radical ethos of
1960s-era counterculture: "Rooted in the political
climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, our
scholarship, like other currents of dissent is a
Chicana critique of cultural, political, and economic
conditions in the United States."
A high-pitched critic of economic conditions in the
United States, Facio takes a conspicuously more
charitable view of life in Castroite Cuba. Long a
faithful supporter of Cuba’s Stalinist regime, Facio is
an active member in the National Network on Cuba. A
windmill for pro-Castro propaganda, the NNOC regularly
features statements from Cuban officials on its
website, and maintains that "[n]early all of the U.S.
government's charges against Cuba's human rights record
are simply untrue". In addition to plumping for the
Cuban government, Facio has in the past traveled there
with students. Facio has led a delegation of 100
activists culled from far-leftist student groups like
the Venceremos Brigade, an unabashed shill for the
Castro dictatorship, to Havana for a leftist convention
called International Woman’s Conference.
Facio's fellow specialist in Chicano studies is Arturo
Aldama. Hired by CU in the summer of 2003, Aldama is
co-chair of CU's Chancellors Advisory Committee on
Minority Affairs, in which capacity he rails against
the allegedly pervasive discrimination against Latino's
inside the university. In a recent interview in the CU
student newspaper, the Campus Press, he lashed out at
the "environment of hostility" that minority faculty
members allegedly face. "We live in a very diverse
state but we hardly have any Latino faculty, or women
of color in our faculty," Aldama explained. "We want
the diversity of CU to reflect the diversity of the
U.S. and the state of Colorado." This argument is also
the subject of Aldama's book, Disrupting Savagism:
Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native
American Struggles for Self-Representation, which
contains such chapter titles as "Millennial Anxieties:
Borders, Violence, and the Struggle for Chicana and
Chicano Subjectivity".
Like his colleagues at the Department of Ethnic
Studies, Aldama also takes his leftist politics into
his classroom. In the spring of 2004, for example,
Aldama taught a class which visibly blurred the line
between education and activism. The class was presented
as "a creative writing workshop on the ethnic spoken
word, featuring the work of Puerto Rican, African
American and other poets focusing on social change."
(Also like his colleagues, Aldama refused to comment
for this article. Instead, Aldama sent us an email
attacking Front Page Editor-in-Chief David Horowitz,
writing, "I admire immensely his ideological and racial
fascism and its centrality to intellectual diversity.")
Amidst the tempest surrounding Ward Churchill, Aldama
emerged as the besieged radical's most vocal
apologists. When critics called attention to the
multifarious inaccuracies, distortions and arrant
falsehoods in Churchill's work, Aldama rallied to
Churchill’s side. "He's impeccable on his sources and
known for his empirical and archival-based
methodologies," Aldama told the Denver Post. "Whether
you agree with it [Churchill’s work] or not, it's
always been praised for academic rigor. He has 400
footnotes per chapter." Aldama offered no comment on
the observation, made by Churchill's critics, that
Churchill's footnotes suffered from the same faults as
the texts to which he so zealously appended them.
One explanation for Aldama's enthusiastic defense of
Churchill is that his views, at least with respect to
the United States and the putative evils of its foreign
policy, accord in all the essentials with the fevered
propaganda spouted by the disgraced former head of the
department. Writing in April 2003 in the leftist online
magazine Bad Subjects, Aldama published an attack on
the U.S.-led military campaign in Iraq that could have
been penned by Churchill himself. Aldama began by
lambasting American media outlets, which, as he saw it,
were uniformly in favor of the war, writing: "I want to
look at the attempts by the state and by
corporate-driven media to manipulate and coerce its
body politic into becoming docile entertainment
consumers of US military hegemony." Elsewhere in the
article, Aldama excoriated the U.S. military efforts in
a manner that was strikingly reminiscent of the
anti-American diatribe that was Churchill's notorious
essay. "Spin doctors," Aldama theorized, "are paid to
continue the jingoism that has marked Bush's
pseudo-populist presidency, especially post-9/11, to
mitigate/justify/applaud/deny the violence of
shrapnel-ripped skulls and buildings, groundwater
poisoned for decades, the trauma of a bomb's noise and
the anxiety of impending death that scar children's
psyches as I write, death by friendly fire, the bombing
of open markets and hospitals, and the use of scatter
bombs."
A not dissimilar line was taken by Adrian Gaskins, a
professor of American Studies at the CU Department of
Ethnic Studies. In March of 2003, Gaskins participated
in an anti-war event by University of Colorado faculty
called "Books Not Bombs". Gaskins contribution was
taking part in a panel called "Race and War", for which
he presented his views on "U.S. Colonialism".
When not summoning nightmare visions of "U.S.
colonialism", the faculty of the Department of Ethnic
Studies is fighting a rearguard action against the
notion of objective truth. That has been a longtime
pursuit of William King,
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17296
who heads the Afro-American Studies division of the
department. The editor of the department's in-house
periodical, the Journal of Ethnic Studies, King is a
disciple of the constructivist school of teaching. In
keeping with his belief that truth and knowledge are
merely a social construction, King explains: "I stress
the idea that knowledge, like truth, especially that
presented in school, is also a social product assembled
in accordance with the criteria of construction we
learned in scholar school." Accordingly, King's
students take part in an organized rebellion against
truth: "I want them to learn to question: What they
know, what they believe, what they have previously
taken on faith - that at some time in their lives they
will have to come to grips with the idea that truth is
not an objective ideal but rather a social product made
up of selected bits and pieces of acceptable
information organized for some specific purpose and
very much a function of the belief system they have
chosen to embrace, that they are then called upon to
identify and interpret."
As King's preferred teaching philosophy suggests, the
classes offered through the department of Ethnic
Studies reflect, without exception, the leftist
politics of the professors. For instance, a class
called "Chicana Feminisms and Knowledges" is
unequivocal about the radical agenda at its core. By
means of an “analysis of feminism and feminismo", the
class "challenges orthodoxy, whatever its intellectual
root or cultural origin". "Internal colonialism", and
"institutional racism", meanwhile, are the subjects of
a class called "Chicanos in the U.S. Social System".
Still other classes add up to for-credit assaults on
Western values. Such is the underpinning theme of a
class offered under the misleading title "Exploring a
Non-Western Culture". In fact, the course is a
semester-long assault on Western culture, whose
"principal goal is to instill an appreciation of
non-Western cultural diversity in material adaptations,
social patterns, ideas and values, and aesthetic
achievements, thus recognizing a range of cultural
solutions to common human problems."
Combine the overtly political content of such classes
with the comprehensively radical make-up of the
faculty, and you arrive at the Department of Ethnic
Studies' ill-concealed mission: To cultivate a new
generation of degreed activists to carry forth their
claims about the inherent malevolence and racism of
American culture. Ward Churchill may no longer be its
director, but the radical work of CU's Department of
Ethnic Studies continues apace.
Copyright©2005 FrontPageMagazine.com
--
LP
"We are fighting today for security, for progress,
and for peace, not only for ourselves but for all
men, not only for one generation but for all
generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world
of ancient evils, ancient ills."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
State of the Union Address - 1942
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