Not Another Nickel, Not Another Dime!
Why I can't donate to my alma mater anymore.
I used to have a great fondness my alma mater, the University of Puget Sound, an expensive liberal arts school located in Tacoma, Washington. To show this fondness, I would periodically make a donation to the school to make sure that my name appeared in the school’s annual list of donors. The school changed my life for the better and I figured I owed the school an expression of gratitude. It wasn’t just nostalgia that prompted me to donate; it was a shared sense of purpose.
Not anymore. I haven’t sent the school a dime since receiving the Autumn 2020 issue of the school’s alumni magazine, Arches, which extolled the exploits of the Black Lives Matter movement at the university.
The cover of the magazine was pretty dramatic. It showed a young black woman, class of 2022, yelling into a megaphone addressing an unseen crowd. On the side of the megaphone the student, an African American woman, has written a message that reads “Return It.” Underneath this demand, the student provides her Venmo account name and has written, “Please label it ‘Reparations.’”
Apparently, I was supposed to send money to her via the internet to atone for my sins or those of my ancestors, which is pretty interesting given that the annual cost of attendance at Puget Sound was at the time, around $40,000 a year. That’s not a huge amount compared to some schools back East, but it’s still a decent amount of money. But somehow, the student in question is oppressed.
Then there’s the headline on the magazine’s cover. It declares, “Truth to Power: Amplifying the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement.” With this headline, Puget Sound has made it clear that the university is not a place for intellectual inquiry, but an indoctrination center for leftist radicals. After watching the downtowns of numerous cities being destroyed by BLM and ANTIFA ideologues after terrible riots (and having been the target of a leftist mobbing myself) there is simply no way I can support an institution that extolls, and does not scrutinize, the virtues of the BLM movement.
The articles inside the magazine weren’t much better. One article written by a Puget Sound student describes how she was able to organize a protest rally at which attendees shouted, “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” Left unmentioned is that this slogan is based on the falsehood that Michael Brown had put his hands up and surrendered to police before he was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. In fact, Brown was trying to wrest a gun from the police officer who shot him.
Another article, written by Puget Sound faculty member Latoya T. Brackett and titled “Black Curriculum Matters,” describes Trayvon Martin, a young black man who was shot to death in 2012, as having been murdered by “a white vigilante.” The fact is, Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, a Hispanic American who was found not guilty of murder after the shooting. One factor contributing to the verdict was that Martin was on trespassed property.
Sadly, Brackett’s falsehoods do exactly what the magazine’s headline promised — amplify the dishonest and counterfactual BLM narrative. If the editorial staff at Arches were intent in on making me proud to be “A Logger,” the moniker for Puget Sound Alum, it would have written a headline more along the lines of “Subjecting the Black Lives Matter Movement to the scrutiny it deserves.”
That BLM deserved scrutiny is indisputable. First off, the movement has promoted a false narrative about police officers indiscriminately shooting unarmed black men on the streets of American cities. As Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist at Kentucky State University, has reported in his book Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can’t Talk About] (Regnery, 2020). In this text, Reilly declares that, “Simply put, there is no epidemic of specifically black people being shot by police.”
The numbers Reilly and others have compiled bear this out. Yes, police officers, white and black, sometimes kill suspects of all races in the cities they patrol. And yes, some of these shootings are unjust, but the notion of white police officers waging war on black men is simply false.
Yes, evidence does indicate that police officers are more likely to use non-lethal force against African Americans than people of other races, but the notion that cops are shooting black men down in cold blood on a regular basis in the United States is a false and lethal narrative that is almost as destructive as the big lie the post-bellum South that black men were raping white women. It wasn’t happening, but the belief that it did cost black men their lives, just as the aftereffects of the BLM narrative is costing them their lives today.
The false belief that cops are indiscriminately shooting black men in the U.S. has had a destabilizing effect on American public life prompting rioters of all races to destroy the downtowns of major cities throughout the country in 2020. Life hasn’t gotten much better in these cities since.
BLM and Antifa activists deployed the video of George Floyd’s death the same way anti-Israel activists I used to contend with deploy footage of Mohamad al Dura’s death in the Gaza Strip in 2000 — to foment an intifada and justify violence. This intifada was not directed at Israel, but the American republic. The results were disastrous, prompting cities and the police they employ to abandon the monopoly on force they needed to maintain order.
The “defund the police” movement fueled by this false narrative has caused police officers to retreat from city neighborhoods throughout the country, contributing to a well-documented spike in murders in those very cities. It’s a repeat of what happened after the false “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” narrative surrounding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri prompted riots throughout the country which prompted a decline in policing in major cities, which in turn prompted an increase in the murder rate in those cities. And who are the most likely victims of most of these murders? Black men.
Asking me to donate to a school that promotes, and does not scrutinize, the BLM ideology is like asking an Israeli to donate to Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, a hotbed of lethal anti-Israel incitement. I spent almost two decades of my life battling folks who deploy what scholar Richard Landes calls “lethal narratives” to incite violence against Israelis only to see a similar narrative used to justify riots in the United States.
If Puget Sound were serious about being a place of inquiry, and not indoctrination, it would also challenge its students to look at how BLM’s previously stated desire to “disrupt” the nuclear family squares with the needs of American society. The BLM movement has also declared that it is opposed to “heteronormativity.” Black conservatives, whose names do not show up anywhere on the website of the school’s African American Studies Department, argue that Americans of all colors need stronger families and a greater commitment to fatherhood to improve the lives of people living in our cities and yet, here we have BLM putting forth an ideology that seeks to disrupt these very goods.
Somebody at the school needs to do some thinking. Is it really a good idea for the school to promote the notion of white privilege? Before answering that question school officials need to take a look at the diplomas they hand out to students as they graduate. The diplomas confer degrees “with all the rights and privileges” that come with a bachelor’s degree. The school doesn’t just sell an education, but the privilege that comes along with it, and here it is telling us that privilege is a bad thing.
I will take the school at its word and withhold my support for its evil machinations until further notice.
Dexter Van Zile is managing editor of Focus on Western Islamism published by the Middle East Forum and a 1987 graduate of the University of Puget Sound. His opinions are his own.