Firenze Sage: Chimera or racism?

Margo Hendricks, Univ. of CA at Santa Cruz professor in Literature for 20 years, says that racism is alive and well on the campus during her tenure. Statistics on Ratemyprofessors.com show that retiring UCSC professor Hendricks is viewed as unorganized, self centered and fails to listen.

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Racism at Univ. of CA at Santa Cruz?

The fact that racism has been alive and well on the campus during my tenure at UCSC has never escaped me,” she [Margo Hendricks] wrote. “Students, staff and faculty of African American descent (regardless of color) experience subtle and not so subtle attacks in the classroom, in evaluations, and personnel actions.”

Thus spake Margo Hendricks who provides no evidence to support her rant, but expects millions or billions to be spent to alleviate her complaint.

Of note the website “Ratemyprofessors.com” is almost universal in the view that she is unorganized, self centered, and fails to listen.

A recent rally at UCSC demanded a more diversified student body so that ethnic groups at the school reflect the same percentage as the population as a whole.

This is the same campus, UCSC, that awarded Black Panther Huey Newton a PhD, [cop killer tried several times for murder and later convicted of embezzling money from programs he created for black children] and employs in positions of authority Stalinist thinking Angela Davis and sister Bettina Aptheker.

Racist graffiti is unfortunate but hardly cataclysmic. Some paint remover would solve more problems than a giant new affirmative action plan.

by FirenzieSage48@gmail.com
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For persons who do not know who Huey Newton is, here is some info:

Huey Newton proved to be as violent as the party he helped to create when he was thrust into the national limelight in October 1967; accused of murdering Oakland police officer John Frey. In September 1968 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to two to 15 years in prison. In May 1970 the California Appellate Court reversed Newton’s conviction and ordered a new trial. After two more trials the State of California dropped its case against Newton, citing technicalities including the judge’s failure to relay proper instructions to the jury.

After his release from prison Newton overhauled the Black Panther Party, revised its program, and changed its rhetoric. While he had been imprisoned, party membership had decreased significantly in several cities, and the FBI had started a campaign to disrupt and eventually bring down the Black Panthers. Abandoning its Marxist-Leninist ideology, Newton now concentrated on community survival programs. The Black Panthers sponsored a free breakfast program for children, sickle-cell anemia tests, free food and shoes, and a school, the Samuel Napier Intercommunal Youth Institute. However, as before, the Black Panthers were not without controversy. Funding for several of their programs were raised as the result of the co-operation of drug dealers and prostitution rings.

Newton tried to shed his image as a firebreathing revolutionary, but he continued to have difficulty with the police. In 1974 several assault charges were filed against him, and he was also accused of murdering a 17-year-old prostitute, Kathleen Smith. Newton failed to make his court appearance. His bail was revoked, a bench warrant issued, and his name added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most wanted list. Newton had jumped bail and escaped to Cuba, where he spent three years in exile. In Cuba he worked as a machinist and teacher. He returned home in 1977 to face murder charges because, he said, the climate in the United States had changed and he believed he could get a fair trial. He was acquitted of the murder of Kathleen Smith after two juries were deadlocked.

In addition to organizing the Black Panther Party and serving as its minister of defense, Newton unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968. In 1971, between his second and third trials for the murder of John Frey, he visited China for ten days, where he met with Premier Chou En-lai and Chiang Ch’ing, the wife of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. While there he was offered political asylum. Newton studied for a Ph.D. in the history of social consciousness at the University of California in 1978. In 1985 the 43-year-old Newton was arrested for embezzling state and federal funds from the Black Panthers’ community education and nutrition programs. In 1989 he was convicted of embezzling funds from a school run by the Black Panthers, supposedly to support his alcohol and drug addictions. By this time the Panthers had turned to less violent activism. On August 22, 1989, Newton was gunned down by a drug dealer, ironically in the same city streets of Oakland that saw the rise of the Black Panthers 23 years ago. Bill Turque in Newsweek described a sad but appropriate farewell: “A small florist’s card, resting with bouquets of red gladiolus’s and white dahlias on a chain-link fence near the shooting scene, summed it up: ‘Huey: for the early years.'”

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