Students at Princeton University will soon have the opportunity to take a course entirely devoted to BLM and Marxist ideals. The class will feature readings from avowed Marxists, one of whom received a “Lenin Peace Prize” from communist East Germany in 1979. The professor who will teach the course, Hanna Garth, specializes in Black Lives Matter adjacent subjects and has published a book on the subject of what she describes as violence against the future of black food culture.
Class wholly devoted to BLM
The teaching of courses related to the causes supported by Black Lives Matter is nothing especially new, though the Princeton course is a more blatant endorsement of BLM than most.
A 2020 course at Princeton claimed to be devoted to introducing students to the study of race in sociology by examining BLM and Covid-19.
The new course is explicitly centered on studying the opinions and methods of BLM and the course description implies that it will be a fairly straightforward endorsement.
The description states that “the movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies.”
The course and the movement are closely linked in this description and it is obvious enough that there will be no pretense of nuance or objectivity.
The change in language between the 2020 and 2021 courses is striking in that no attempt is made in the new class to describe it as anything other than an enthusiastic embrace of BLM.
Marxist reading list
While the book on black food which Hanna Garth published last year does not appear on the sample reading list it is likely to appear as the subject seems to be her primary area of expertise.
Angela Davis, a proud Marxist agitator, does appear in the sample reading list and will almost certainly be presented uncritically to students.
Davis has a history of involvement in domestic terrorism and has never made a secret of the fact that she is a devoted communist.
Black Lives Matter as an organization has been forced on occasion to tone down some of the more radical Marxist rhetoric, though the beliefs which motivate the activists remain heavily based on communist ideals.
The group previously claimed to be working to dismantle the nuclear family, which they allege to be a tool of the white supremacist Western system of oppression.
While the more extreme views promoted by BLM are unlikely to feature too prominently in the Princeton course, the description of the class implies that these ideas are laudable.