Princeton University is offering a Black Lives Matter course, which will teach students about the “historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement.” Starting this fall semester, Princeton University students can enroll in the “#BlackLivesMatter” course, which will feature readings from a former Black Panther member and avowed Marxist, as reported by The College Fix.
The course description reads:
This seminar traces the historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States and comparative global contexts. The movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies. The course seeks to document the forms of dispossession that Black Americans face, and offers a critical examination of the prison industrial complex, police brutality, urban poverty, and white supremacy in the US.
The course includes readings from Angela Davis’ book “Freedom is a Constant Struggle.” Davis is an avowed Marxist, former Black Panther member, two-time vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA, and was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union.
The class at Princeton, which has a tuition of $56,010, will be taught by professor Hanna Garth, who is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist.
From Garth’s website:
I am most broadly interested in the ways in which people struggle to overcome structural violence. My recent work is focused on the connections between food systems, structural inequalities, health, and wellbeing. This work has looked at the ways in which macro-level changes and shifts in local food distribution systems impact communities, families, and individuals. I have studied how food scarcity and reduced access to affordable food influence individual distress, and household and community dynamics. I have also studied the ways in which food justice organizations attempt to improve access to healthy food for low income communities.
The professor adds, “All of my research, teaching, and mentoring is designed around my commitment to feminist methodologies and critical race theory.”
Garth has taught other classes, such as “Race and Racisms,” “Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory,” and “Theories of Social Justice.”
Garth wrote a book titled “Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice,” which “analyzes how Blackness is contested through food, differing ideas of what makes our sustenance ‘healthy,’ and Black individuals’ own beliefs about what their cuisine should be.”
“This comprehensive look at Black food culture and the various forms of violence that threaten the future of this cuisine centers Blackness in a field that has too often framed Black issues through a white-centric lens, offering new ways to think about access, privilege, equity, and justice,” the overview of the book states.
Garth and Princeton administrators did not respond to requests for comments about the Black Lives Matter course from The College Fix.
In 2020, Princeton University offered a course titled: “Sociology 102: Police Violence, #BlackLivesMatter and the Covid-19 Pandemic.” The course will “introduce students to the concept of race and discipline of sociology.”
“Students will learn to study systematically how human groups interact with one another and how social networks and a variety of institutions help shape those interactions and outcomes,” the course description reads. “How are these interactions and outcomes categorized and understood? Where do different people fit into the social categories we use to make sense of our societies, and why? And how are different actors able to transform those spaces in which to fit?”
In March, Princeton University welcomed Black Lives Matter Global Network co-founder Alicia Garza to hold a lecture titled: “The Purpose of Power.”
In a 2015 interview, Black Lives Matter Global Network co-founder Patrisse Cullors said that she and Garza are “trained Marxists.”
“Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists,” Cullors said in the interview. “We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”
The Black Lives Matter Global Network website previously declared that the organization was against the nuclear family.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the BLM organization stated in its “About” section before deleting it last September.
