As millions of Americans decry the rampant destruction of this nation’s historical monuments in the name of “social justice,” a self-described “activist academic” University of Oregon professor has received a $350,000 federal government grant to identify even more targets for removal.
In a glowing article praising the project on the university’s website, Ethnic Studies Professor Laura Pulido declares that her initial research “confirms that racism is deeply ingrained in American historical commemoration and cultural memory.”
“Although white supremacy — the overt belief in the superiority of white people — was central to the creation of the U.S., the nation is deeply invested in denying its role,” Pulido is quoted as saying in the article. The university then reveals that Pulido “was awarded a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue the research project.”
The watchdog website Campus Reform highlighted Pulido’s federally funded witch hunt on Oct. 28.
In her official University of Oregon bio, Pulido uses that foreboding term “cultural memory” to explain how she sees American heritage as a tool of oppression. “Most of my work explores the various ways in which racial inequality is actively produced, as well as the various means by which it is denied. I am particularly interested in how these processes operate in terms of environmental justice, landscape, cultural memory and political activism,” Pulido declares.
Ben Franklin Out, Maoist Hippies In?
Pulido served as an especially radical professor at the University of Southern California for several years before moving up the left coast to Oregon. Her notions of worthwhile “cultural memory” go far beyond our Founding Fathers. In 2006, Pulido wrote an exhaustively detailed book, titled Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, which commemorates the extremist activities of what Pulido calls the “Third World Left” revolutionaries of the 1960s. Many were fervent communists.
Pulido’s work could be described as an accurate portrayal of how the communist radicalism of the 1960s helped foster the leftist activism that now operates in more respected establishment circles today. That is, if only she had written it as an expose rather than an homage.
“Pulido’s powerful excavation of the Third World Left’s historical past provides reasons to hope for a more just, antiracist left future,” fellow radical professor Lisa Lowe of Yale University proclaims in a review cited by Google Books.
Professional Professorial Activist
Though draped in the robes of professorial scholarship, Pulido does not hide her outright support of radical activism. Indeed, she openly describes herself as an “activist academic” even as she acknowledges the seeming incongruity of such a designation.
Laura Pulido
In 2008 Pulido wrote an essay titled “FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar/Activist” that was included in the book Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship.
“Dear Potential Scholar Activist,” the essay begins. “I am taking this opportunity to write an open letter to all those contemplating or in the early stages of an academic career and wondering if and how they can negotiate the seemingly disparate demands of political engagement and academic performance.”
“There are many different ways to be a scholar activist, each of which has its own merits and makes a particular contribution,” she asserts.
This is the woman being given federal funds to pass judgment on our nation’s historical monuments.
“What the country chooses to remember and represent through historical memory – and how it does that – speaks volumes about what is important to Americans, said Pulido, a Collins Chair in the College of Arts and Sciences,” the University of Oregon’s trumpeting article on its activist professor proclaims.
“And at nearly all monuments across the country, no acknowledgment is found of white supremacy or the racial processes involved in the site, which amounts to an erasure of the racial violence and injustice integral to the roots of the country.”
Read that last sentence again and ask yourself one question: What memorials to anything that happened in this nation before the 1960s can survive such elastic parameters set forth by a thoroughly fraudulent credentialed expert armed with fistfuls of your taxpayer money?
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
