BUZZ
On November 18, the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference will hold a “guided reading discussion” about the 75th anniversary of the Civil Rights Congress’s “We Charge Genocide” petition.
According to the Civil Rights Movement Archive, in 1951 Paul Robeson and William Patterson presented the United Nations with “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People,” which was signed by “almost 100 American intellectuals and activists.”
These included the known communists Claudia Jones, Oakley C. Johnson (founding member of the Communist Party of America and Proletarian Party of America), James Ford, and Ferdinand Smith.
The petition “documents hundreds of lynching cases and other forms of brutality and discrimination evincing a clear pattern of government inaction and complicity,” and claims “in the 85 years since the end of slavery more than 10,000 Blacks are known to have been lynched.”
(According to the 1860 U.S. Census, the last before the end of the Civil War, the total black population in the U.S. was 4.4 million. Ten thousand of that figure is a bit over 0.2 percent.)
The archive notes at the time the media gave “scant coverage to the petition,” and that the Civil Rights Congress was dubbed a “communist front organization.”
The Center for the Study of Social Difference event will “contemplate th[e] strategy which took the struggle of Black folks out of the realm of the national and placed it on an international stage,” and examine goals of the Malcolm X group Organization of Afro American Unity.
It will further commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Greasy Grass at which Lieutenant Colonel George Custer was killed by the combined forces of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Native American tribes.
This pair of “guided reading discussions” reportedly will “challenge the exclusionary logics of the United States as a settler-colonial state and examine the experiences of minoritized communities,” according to the center.
According to its website, the Center for the Study of Social Difference is “an interdisciplinary research center supporting collaborative projects that address race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.”
“We live in a world where social differences – between women and men; cis and trans; rich and poor; global north and global south; between black, brown and white; and between people who are differently abled – have been made to matter,” the center notes.
“These differences undergird inequalities, locally and globally, and limit cultural horizons.”
The center’s most recent news piece — from the “University in/and Crisis working group” — claims groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Horowitz Freedom Center, and Heritage Foundation “mobilize the labels of antisemite, communist, terrorist, and Hamas-supporter to not just undermine any critiques of the Zionist project but simultaneously ensure the continuation and completion of the genocide in Gaza.”
MORE: Students condemn Israeli ‘genocide.’ Their slogans are wrong — and dangerous.
