Celebrating Black History Month at the University of California in San Francisco

There are many dignified ways to celebrate Black History Month. For example, one might read aloud on NPR excerpts from the eloquent Frederick Douglass, or poems by the 18th century Phillis Wheatley, or passages from Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, or the writings of those known as members of the Harlem Renaissance — Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes. One could discuss the life of Bayard Rustin, the main organizer and unsung hero of the March on Washington, who finally received his due last year when the movie “Rustin” was released. The music of Sidney Bechet, Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the singing of Billy Eckstine, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and that singer and trumpeter and all-round musical genius Louis Armstrong — all these offer great possibilities for Black History Month. No gangsta rappers need apply.

But at the University of California in San Francisco, Black History Month was celebrated in a different way, with an invited speaker, one Dante King, who spoke on Whiteness and Blackness. More on King can be found here: “‘Whites are Psychopathic’: UC Speaker Uses Black History Month to Launch into Racist Attacks,” Jonathan Turley, February 13, 2024:

The University of California (San Francisco) is under fire this week after hosting a racist speaker who attacked white people as psychopaths and claimed that black women can be legally raped. A conservative campus group posted clips from the event in which author Dante King lambasted the United States and its institutions as racist and maintaining a white “rape culture.” Imagine if a speaker or professor gave a lecture that called blacks “psychopaths” and responsible for a rape culture. The university would be quickly shutdown in a campus-wide effort at introspection, condemnation, and healing. Instead, King’s lecture was followed by applause.

During the Black History Month event, King delivered a lecture titled “Diagnosing Whiteness and Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis and Trauma in America.”
He explained how

“whites are psychopaths… and their behavior represents an underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. How many of you can see the proclivity that evolved deep within the evolutionary history of Whiteness? By show of hands, how many of you could see it? Some people are sitting here, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to raise my hand,’ that’s called denial.”

King said he is not worried about how the whites in the audience react because he does not value or prioritize their feelings or views: “I’m not seeking agreement from White people at all. I don’t prioritize Whiteness or White people in my work in that way.”

There was little need to consider any whites on campus and what they think because “I think Whites are psychopathic. I think there are many lies. The level of lying that White people do that has started since colonialism. We’re just used to it.”

He also denounced the United States and its institutions as based on “anti-Blackness” as “the foundation of all American, all White American institutions.” Presumably, that is why

“there is no discussion about the delusions and the perversion of Whiteness. Say this with me: rape culture in America is a legal, economic, and moral institution. So we’re going to…we have it written in the law, you can rape Black women – but we’ve never been a racist country. This goes beyond gaslighting, and it’s rooted in psychological delusion.”

UC-San Francisco is full of faculty who have expressly committed themselves to being anti-racist but there was nary a complaint about this vehemently racist lecture.

So whites are, without exception, “psychopaths.” All whites do is tell lies, lies we’ve been telling since “colonialism.” I’m a bit hazy on when that “colonialism” began, but according to Dante King, it is still going strong. America., he claims, is “based on anti-Blackness.” Not on the Constitution, and the rights it guarantees to all the citizens of America. No, everything is based on a ferocious — indeed psychopathic — desire to keep Blacks subjugated. Whites — all Whites — believe that they have a “right to rape black women.” This anti-Blackness is the “foundation of all American, all White American institutions.” And what, pray tell, is the foundation of all Black American institutions? Could it be Anti-Whiteness? But while Anti-Blackness is terrible, Anti-Whiteness is perfectly understandable, legitimate, and praiseworthy.

Whites will deny this home truth, will ignore the mountains of evidence of their monstrous evil, evidence so obvious that we need not bother to produce it. Whites will lie and deny and lie some more. But what can you expect from people who are, without exception, “psychopathic”?

For those wishing to learn more about Dante King, do visit his website, where, among other fascinating things, he has posted a summary of his book “The 400-Year-Holocaust”:

The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide – and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory examines and discusses the relationships between the legal history of anti-blackness and Whiteness through colonialism and the United States, and its impacts on present-day America. It centers anti-blackness as the core tenet of “racism” in White America and amplifies its relationship to the inherent “value” of Whiteness (i.e., White identity, White culture, White institutions, etc.). The text repositions and critically examines four core White American economic, moral, socio-cultural, and ideological institutions: human sex trafficking, rape, pedophilia, and violence (murder).

Furthermore, it positions racism as a disease/illness (i.e., psychosis, psychopathy, sociopathy, etc.), rather than a mere “social construct”; and amplifies the significance of anti-blackness and Whiteness within and throughout White American institutions (i.e., legality, politics, language, economics, etc.), past and present.

Mr. King is quite an entrepreneur. He offers — for deep-pocketed people or corporations wishing to put an end to their anti-Black psychopathy — all sorts of therapeutic services. Please take a look here. A long look.

I am sure his career will make as deep an impression on you as it did on me.