University of California-Los Angeles Lecturer Gordon Klein faces an online petition that asks UCLA to terminate his employment, following an email he allegedly sent to a student regarding “special treatment” for black students in light of the George Floyd protests.
The viral petition, signed by nearly 20,000 people, claims Klein’s “blatant lack of empathy and unwillingness to accommodate his students during a time of protests speaks to his apathetic stance on the matter.”
UCLA Anderson School of Management spokeswoman Rebecca Trounson confirmed to Campus Reform that Klein is “on leave from campus and his classes have been reassigned to other faculty.”
What the accounting expert do?
“Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota,” Klein’s email read, according to the petition. “Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage [sic], such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they probably are especially devastated as well.”
Klein’s email continued, “I am thinking that a white student from there might be possibly even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not. My TA is from Minneapolis, so if you don’t know, I can probably ask her. Can you guide me on how you think I should achieve a ‘no-harm ‘outcome since our sole course grade is from a final exam only? One last thing strikes me: Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?”
He/she/ze/they would still have a job if he/she/ze/they had followed the “less is more” principle by responding with the following:
I wonder if the U.S. is now simply too populated and government too centralized for us to be confident that Citizen A will care about Citizen B. As there are people suffering badly in other parts of the world and most of us don’t do much to help them it is clear that human sympathy cannot stretch to a population of 7+ billion. Thus why should we expect sympathy to stretch to 324 million (popclock)?
(in 2020, the numbers are 7.65 billion and 330 million)
Our subsequent three editorials will address actionable responses the University can take. In the first, we will call on the University to address its own complicity in racist and anti-activist policing. Harvard must abolish its private police force. The Harvard University Police Department is no different than municipal and state forces across the nation. HUPD has been deployed in the armed policing of Boston-area protests and has helped arrest protesters at least once in recent memory. It has a history of racist policing and a current culture of racism, unjustifiable violence, and unaccountability. It has no place on our campus.
In the second, we — in a long-overdue shift — will join the call for Harvard to divest from private prisons and the prison industrial complex. Our previous precedent was not only insensitive, but missed the point. We can no longer fail the black community by failing to take into account the magnitude of oppression enacted by the prison industrial complex and its investors. Harvard can’t either.
In the third, we will dive into Harvard’s continued engagement with issues of race, both internally and externally. From explicitly — and with real financial teeth — supporting mutual aid funds, nonprofit organizations, and bail funds that combat state oppression of black people, to moving beyond facile diversity and inclusion rhetoric toward a more robust engagement with racism, discrimination, and ignorance on our campus, we will call attention to a number of ways — long advocated for by the activists already committed to this fight — that Harvard can consistently make its campus and community more just.
Racism in the U.S. (and “genocide” perpetrated by Israel) doesn’t stand a chance now that Harvard undergraduates are Zooming to the front lines.
We must come together as a Met community to grieve and to reflect on how we, as individuals, and as a museum, can do more to support social justice efforts in this country. We are thinking through various ways we can create opportunities for staff to have these conversations remotely, and we will share more details on what’s next in the coming days.
What’s the value of this offer to “come together” if the museum is closed? Those passionate about social justice can’t even go in to see all of the prominently featured art by dead white European males.
The comments on the site are interesting. Americans love empty words, it seems:
Thank you for Standing in Solidarity. What a fabulous idea.
Thank you for your commitment to build from these defining lessons born from our torn national fabric and lack of patriotic and empathetic leadership.
Thank you for this important public statement.
At a time when we have so little to be proud of, your statement makes me proud to be a patron and volunteer at the MET.
So important that the arts become a vocal part of our National crisis. Thank you for this statement.
As an world reknowned institution, it is unprecedented that you would reach out to the disenfranchized people of New York City as you have done
Thank you for your leadership in broadcasting this important message of acknowledgement of the absolute horror of our own uniformed police …
Thank you for making your views clear . It is wonderful for a cultural institution to be so explicit over it’s support for this matter.
Tony Mcdade, Nina Pop, Muhlasia Booker, and so many more. Black Trans Lives Matter.
In other words, even if you haven’t gone to work for more than three months, you can still be a hero if you tell your web contractors over in India to put a black image on your home page!
Uh oh, a couple of people want to see something beyond an update to the HTML on the index page:
While the museum is closed, would you consider hanging banners on the facade of the MET that are created by black artists, support the Black Lives Matter movement, and/or honor George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, or Breonna Taylor?
Will you be donating to The Black Lives Matter movement or offering donations of any kind to any programs?
A Deplorable comment:
Does your plan include the other oppressed groups, or will it be at their expense?
LGBT Age discrimination etc.
(He/she/ze/they forgot about half of the victims in “LGBTQIA+”!)
Separately, when do art museums reopen in the plague lands? A lot of Texas museums are reopened (e.g., Kimball), but there does not seem to be any plan for Boston and New York. Why can’t they add a $50 plague fee to each entrance, do security monitoring remotely with cameras, and call it good? The Met is 2 million square feet. If there are 500 people in the museum, are they really more likely to spread the virus to each other than if these same people were walking around on Manhattan sidewalks, going into grocery and liquor stores, meeting on Tinder, etc.?
New York does not have a monopoly on virtue. Here’s the home page of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, now in Month 4 of its closure:
The “Give Today” link is to a Black Lives Matter organization? It is certainly noble of the institution for rich white people to use their platform to raise money for Bostonians of Color! Oh wait… clicking “Give Today” leads to an appeal to give money to the Museum of Fine Arts, not to Black Lives Matter:
What does the rich white Canadian who runs the museum have to say about the experience of poor black Americans:
It is past time to recognize that the usual commitments to change are not enough, and that we have an obligation to make a difference. Only demonstrable actions will evidence a commitment. We acknowledge that the MFA, like many art and cultural organizations across America, has work to do to become the institution to which we aspire. This is the time for us to determine: “How will the MFA take the lead on bridging and healing the divides that exist among us?”
Past commitments didn’t work. What’s the solution? Additional commitments:
We commit to action, to listen, to do, to speak, to gather, to insist.
The author of Medical School 2020 said that he was going to be taking “bystander training.” I responded with “So you’ll know what to do if you see a car accident, like Tom Cruise?” It turned out to be something different:
We are excited to bring Bystander Training to [the school]. This program was built by [a person with a female-typical first name and degrees in psychology and women’s studies] and designed to train citizens to safely intercede when they see another individual at risk of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault. This evidence-based program is regarded highly as one avenue through which sexual harassment and sexual assault can be successful combatted.
This training will prove helpful not only in your interpersonal interactions privately, but also in your interpersonal interactions professionally. Unfortunately, sexual harassment and sexual assault are found in every setting. Learning how to navigate extremely challenging moments in time can prove invaluable to everyone involved.
This training is required for all M1, M2, and M3 students.
[signature from an administrator with a female-typical first name]
Confused by the Black Lives Matter protests? If my inbox is anything to go by, our millionaire white school administrators are here to help!
From Rafael Reif, the president of MIT:
The death of George Floyd and the events unfolding in Minneapolis are deeply disturbing in themselves. And of course, they come on the heels of highly charged incidents, from Georgia to New York, that highlight yet again the tragic persistence of racism and systemic injustice in the United States.
I know that the pain of these events is especially intense for certain members of our community, beginning with those who are African American and of African descent, though certainly not ending there. And I know that, in this time of tension around the pandemic and rising strains in US-China relations, others in our community are also suffering distinctive forms of harassment and discrimination.
In the days and months to come, I would like us to find meaningful ways to come together to work on these challenges, for ourselves and for our society. I have asked John Dozier, our Institute Community and Equity Officer, to guide us in this effort.
(MIT has already hinted that undergraduates won’t be welcomed back to campus any time soon, so comfort will be provided via Zoom (perhaps with the help of the Chinese referenced in the email?)
From Larry Bacow, president of Harvard:
In the midst of this incomprehensible loss, our nation has once again been shocked by the senseless killing of yet another black person—George Floyd—at the hands of those charged with protecting us. Cities are erupting. Our nation is deeply divided. Leaders who should be bringing us together seem incapable of doing so. [i.e., Trump is bad]
As I think about the challenges that we face today, I return again and again to what I believe:
I believe in the goodness of the people of this country—and in their resilience.
I believe that all of us, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, whatever our race or ethnicity, want a better life for our children. [if he hasn’t talked to a Republican since starting his career in Academia, how does he know what a Republican might want?]
I believe that America should be a beacon of light to the rest of the world.
I believe that our strength as a nation is due in no small measure to our tradition of welcoming those who come to our shores in search of freedom and opportunity, individuals who repay us multiple times over through their hard work, creativity, and devotion to their new home. [remember that immigrants are good]
I believe in the Constitution, the separation of powers, the First Amendment—especially the right to a free and independent press that holds those in power accountable, and to a free and independent judiciary.
The last one is interesting. The First Amendment is apparently not real, since it is something that one either “believes in” or does not. Dr. Bacow is also picking and choosing here. He doesn’t mention the First Amendment right to assemble, which healthy young people have been denied now for months by state governors’ lockdowns.
The promotion of low-skill immigration is interesting because it is black Americans who pay the heaviest price when low-skill immigrants are welcomed by coastal elites such as Dr. Bacow (see “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” for a Harvard professor’s explanation of how low-skill immigration results in a $500 billion/year transfer of wealth from low-skill Americans, like George Floyd, to rich Americans, like Dr. Bacow).
In our nearly all-white suburb, the school superintendent sends us an email with a subject line of “Opportunities to Stand Against Racism”:
Mayor Walsh has asked Boston residents to hold a moment of silence for 8 minutes 46 seconds at 3:45pm in honor of George Floyd. I invite each of us to take part in this symbolic act as a stand against racism and demonstration of support to our community members impacted by acts of violence and racism.
As school has now been shut down for three months, we’ll be standing against racism on the two-acre zoning minimum lots that serve to exclude black Americans from our “community”…
Despite there being only one school in the town (K-8 for about 440 town-resident students), in addition to the above-referenced superintendent and her assistants, we also have two school principals. They sent out a joint email “K-8: We Stand Together Against Racism”:
Students, staff, families and community members have joined in conversations this week to talk about racism. We are committed to speaking out and creating change, and to educating ourselves and our school community so that we can cause true change. This video is the collective voice of the Lincoln School educators: We Stand Together Against Racism.
One change that they’ve created recently is committing to building the most expensive school, per student, ever constructed in the United States. This will raise property taxes to the highest levels in Massachusetts, thus creating an additional barrier to lower-income people of color who might want to live here (can they afford $20,000/year in property tax on a median house?).
One irony regarding the new school is that they couldn’t figure out a way to build the new building somewhere on the 70-acre campus other than where the current school is. So half the students (K-4) will be crammed into temporary trailers for three years while the site of the existing building is worked on and the 5-8 students are shuffled from one part of the building to the other.
The existing school, either built or renovated in 1994, has an exterior door in every classroom and massive banks of windows that can be opened for fresh plague-free air. The trailers appear to offer less than half the square footage per student and minimal doors and windows. Given that Americans refuse to believe the Europeans that the science is settled regarding young children not being a significant source of coronaplague, it is unclear how the trailers can ever be occupied.
Here’s a recent photo from an East Coast Aero Club helicopter. The existing school building is in the foreground, an L-shaped building. The trailers are in the middle of the L.
A close-up of the trailers, showing the lack of windows and doors and the generally more compact ideal virus-breeding environment.
So… not only did they contract for the construction at the very peak of the Boston real estate market ($110 million total cost; roughly $250,000 per town-resident student), but they will be trying to cram students into a reduced square footage less-ventilated space just in time for Wave #2 of a global coronavirus pandemic.
Related:
AerialBoston, Tony Cammarata’s site (he took the pictures)
Friends on Facebook are posting support for the Black Lives Matter protests going on around the U.S. A few brave souls post selfies from the (daytime) protests themselves (the vast majority prefer to show their support by updating their Facebook status!).
My stupid question for today is why city-dwellers need to protest to obtain the changes that they seek. The typical American city in which protests have occurred is ruled by a single political party voted for by a population that overwhelmingly identifies with that one party. If the people who live in a city want a different mayor, want the police department to be disbanded and started over from scratch, etc., why didn’t they already just vote for that? What obstacle was in their path?
Consider a few of the cities that have been in the news lately. My friends on Facebook are saying that the protests are necessary #BecauseRepublicans.
If the single-party voters and politicians in the above cities want to change something, why does anyone have to protest? Why can’t they just change whatever they want to change? Nobody from a different party is opposing them.
I tried asking the Facebook righteous this question. Here are some responses;
Jack is suggesting only Republicans will make the argument that black people need to be more aggressively policed. The prediction is true (regardless of your view on the merits of the argument, because some arguments are only made by one party or the other.)
(What difference does it make what arguments Republicans put forward? Why would the Mayor or the City Council of any of the above cities listen to an argument from a Republican?)
Republicans are the Core of Trump’s supporters, White Supremacists, and folks who never questioned the most bizarre acts of Trump.
(But if those Republicans live and vote in the suburbs, how can they stop the people of Minneapolis, for example, from voting to disband the police department, fire the city employees involved with management of police, replace the mayor, hire a new police force with different objectives, etc.?)
What’s it like for folks who are just trying to live in these towns? A friend in Venice, California (on the border with Santa Monica):
LA looks like a zombie movie. Every business boarded up and spray painted. Mobs with picket signs constantly. Everyone wearing masks. Never seen more thieves in a city in my life. People attempted to rob my house on a Friday at 930p while we were home.
In the chat group, a San Francisco resident responded to the above with security camera footage of a dark-sunglasses-wearing thief sifting through the day’s Amazon and UPS deliveries on his doorstep and taking a package.
A more rural Californian responded: Your stories make me feel better about my decision to live with the plane fueled up and the guns loaded. Lucky for us we are in a highly armed gated community. My father just bought a gun for the first time since when we were in Russia in the 1990s. [She speaks with an accent, so I assume she is an immigrant.]
To all of them, a member responded “Wyoming awaits.”
Separately, from a physician friend: “I bet Canada feels like they live in the apartment above a meth lab.”
Readers: The mayors of the big cities where protests are occurring have come out to support the goals of Black Lives Matter (example from San Francisco). If almost everyone in a city agrees that particular changes need to be made, why can’t they simply make those changes?
Related:
“Critics denounce Black Lives Matter platform accusing Israel of ‘genocide'” (Guardian, August 2016): The policy platform titled A Vision for Black Lives, is a wide-spanning document that was drafted by more than 50 organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives. … In the Invest/Divest section of the platform, the group criticizes the US government for providing military aid to Israel. “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the platform says. “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.” (If the U.S. police kill only the occasional citizen while Israel is committing “genocide” against millions of Palestinians, why is BLM bothering to protest anything being done in the U.S.?)
In an email to customers late Thursday, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber Eats will promote black-owned restaurants on its app, and that the service will not charge delivery fees to those restaurants “for the remainder of the year.”
“I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short,” the 51-year-old CEO wrote. “I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths.”
Let’s ignore for a moment how it is just for a “black-owned restaurant” (would Dolezal’s Pub count?) to be spared Uber’s rapacious fees on December 31, 2020 and also just for a “black-owned restaurant” to be hit with those fees on January 1, 2021. (Maybe the problem of racial injustice will be completely solved by January 1?)
If it is unjust to collect fees from “black” (in Uber’s judgment) restaurant owners, how can it be just for Uber drivers who identify as “black” to give up a massive slice of the revenue collected from customers as a fee to Uber? If Uber is measuring restaurant-owner skin color and not charging those it deems to be sufficiently “black,” why isn’t Uber doing the same with drivers? Presumably a typical Uber driver has less wealth than a typical restaurant owner.
Judging by the contents of my inbox, America is truly the land of goodwill and brotherhood. A typical recent example has a subject line of “Uber stands with the Black community”:
I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short. I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths. I wish that all members of our Black community felt safe enough to move around their cities without fear. I wish that I didn’t have to try to find the words to explain all of this to my two young sons.
But I’ve been given hope this week by hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors demanding change. I am committed to being part of that change.
We know this isn’t enough. It won’t be enough until we see true racial justice. But we plan to work day in and day out to improve, learn, and grow as a company.
Dara Khosrowshahi CEO
(From the fact that riots and looting give him hope, I think it is safe to infer that he’s explaining everything to his two young sons while safely enroute in the family Gulfstream from fenced airport to fenced airport.)
The Uber Diversity and Inclusion Report for 2019 shows that standing with the Black community can be done by “tech leaders” who are 51 percent white and 47.5 percent Asian (“Black of African American” people hold 0.8 percent of these jobs; “Hispanic or Latinx” are also at 0.8 percent).
Readers: What would Travis Kalanick have written about recent events?
Loyal readers of this blog (i.e., both of you!) will recall that I have regularly asked whether the lockdown cure is worse than the coronavirus disease. I anticipated deaths in the U.S. due to the shutdown of health care for non-Covid issues, due to poverty and unemployment, due to the shutdown of clinical trials for new/improved medicines, and due to the shutdown of clinical training for medical doctors (post). I anticipated a vast number of deaths in poor countries that were our trading partners.
I did not anticipate civil unrest and the destruction of American cities, but of course in hindsight it seems obvious that locking the poorest Americans into their crummy tiny urban apartments for months, while taking away jobs from most of those who formerly worked, would lead to them eventually emerging and entertaining themselves in ways that wouldn’t be entertaining for the mansion-dwelling governors who ordered the lockdowns. (see “Your lockdown may vary”)
Police departments in the U.S. murder citizens on a regular basis (and why not, since they are generally immune from being fired). The typical police murder does not bother too many Americans or even make the news. This one was unusually disturbing and unusually thoroughly documented on video, of course, but I still don’t think it would have been enough to trigger nationwide riots back in, say, 2019.
In addition to the lockdown itself having put non-mansion-dwelling Americans into a bad mood, I wonder if the lockdown created a general environment of lawlessness. Unlike in Sweden, for example, Americans were told that everything had changed due to the killer virus and therefore their Constitutional rights were inoperative. Since the old laws didn’t apply to the government, maybe the old laws against looting didn’t apply to the subjects?
Is it fair to say that a lot of Americans actually did anticipate this kind of breakdown of society? There was a huge run on guns and ammo back in March, right? I discovered that several of my friends had become new gun owners. These included female physicians in their 40s, for example, living alone in cities. I scoffed at them, saying that the militarized U.S. police state would keep the ghetto-dwellers quietly imprisoned, watching TV while consuming alcohol and opioids purchased via Medicaid.
Readers: Were these riots easy to foresee?
Bonus: Some pictures from a recent helicopter trip over Dover, Massachusetts. #WeAreAllinThisTogether #StayHomeSaveLives
(The house is at 36 Farm Street. Trulia says that the annual property tax is $141,000 per year, i.e., not enough to pay the pension for one retired senior police officer or school administrator. It may belong to Kevin Rollins, former CEO of Dell.)
Related:
official WHO data showing that Sweden, which never locked down, has suffered approximately 4,400 deaths among those who tested positive for Covid-19 (they automatically record any death as a “Covid death” if there was a positive test within the preceding 30 days).
After 2.5 months of lockdown, Massachusetts official reports indicate more than 7,000 deaths (2.27X higher death rate in locked-down MA versus never-locked Sweden, adjusted for population)
