Pan-African studies are “the intellectual arm of the revolution,” the unrepentant communist Angela Davis triumphantly told students at California State University, Los Angeles, in a candid moment in 2016. Well, that arm got a lot longer this week.
The entire California State University system just announced Thursday that it was making ethnic and social justice studies mandatory for everyone who wants a degree.
Yes, that means that ethnic and social justice studies will now have pride of place along with English and science as subjects that must be mastered by those brandishing a bachelor’s degree from the vast California system.
Not that ethnic or social justice studies will do one iota to help these young Americans master their fields or become future leaders, which used to be one of the aims of what was formerly called higher education.
No, ethnic and social justice studies are political indoctrination.
Critics would say, hang on, wouldn’t ethnic and social justice studies help Americans get along better in a diverse workforce, body politics, classrooms, etc.? Those critics, of course, would have very little understanding of what actually is taught in ethnic studies or social justice studies.
Ethnic studies teach the members of what in today’s lexicon we call “minorities” (really, any American who belongs to a group that the activists have convinced the bureaucracy to officialize as marginalized) that they have a long list of grievances against the United States, and particularly against whites.
To Americans who have been cordoned off into the groups thought of as belonging to the “oppressor” classes, ethnic and social justice studies classes instruct them to forthwith act submissively, assume the burden of collective guilt for...
