If you are an aspiring Black doctoral candidate hoping to study English, don’t apply to the University of Chicago’s English Department, as it has recently announced that it will only accept PhD applicants “interested in and with Black Studies.” The American Spectator on Sept. 15 included this quote from the English Department’s website explaining that “English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why…. In light of this historical reality, we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere.’’
Addressing the potential Black PhD candidate, the Spectator bitingly asks, “Are you a Black scholar interested in Christopher Marlowe’s plays, Transcendentalist poetry, or P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, without any racial angle? Too bad. This department, while very committed to Black Lives Matter, is not interested in your particular Black life, apparently.”
Many U.S. colleges and public school systems have decided to enslave themselves to this “Cancel Culture” insanity. On Sept. 22, the Cornell Daily Sun reported that a committee of 600 faculty, graduate students and staff is demanding that Cornell’s administration ensure an “anti-racist” curriculum. Several committee members are from the “feminist, gender and sexuality studies” and African Studies programs and demand “the strengthened support of anti-racist research, incorporating `decolonized readings’ into the curriculum across the board … and implementing anti-sexist and anti-racist policies to address the demographics of department chair positions,” the Cornell Daily Sun reports. (emphasis added)
Look at California, where the state Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond is challenging President Donald Trump’s call to ban teaching of the New York Times fraudulent 1619 Project, instead encouraging its teaching in public schools, Politico reported Sept. 22. One day earlier, the state Education Department announced the “Education To End Hate Initiative,” whose stated purpose is to empower the state’s 6 million K-12 students to “confront the hate, bigotry and racism rising in communities across the state and nation.” Funded by a $1 million grant from the Samuel Bechtel Foundation, the initiative will focus, among other things, on teacher-training regarding “anti-racism and bias.” Also on Sept. 21, the Chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, accused the President of trying to “indoctrinate kids with his 1776 Commission … [claiming] that everything was great in 1776…. We know that in 1776, Black people were generally slaves, women had no legal identity beyond their husbands and being LGBTQ was a capital offense.”
