If you can judge a cause by its enemies, the California Civil Rights Initiative is looking pretty good. Campaigning prominently against it has been University of California at Santa Cruz professor Angela Davis: Communist, Black Panther, gun-runner, darling of the Che-Lumumba Club, and recipient of the Lenin Prize.
Davis has been stumping the state with Eleanor Smeal, former strongperson at the National Organization for Women. They have denounced the initiative — which would abolish race and gender preferences in California’s public institutions — and reviled its backers as brownshirts.
Last year, Davis was selected to hold the “Presidential Chair” at Santa Cruz, whose benefits include a $ 30,000 stipend and research assistance. (This is on top of the $ 68,000 salary Davis already receives for nourishing young California minds.) Could any of this taxpayer money, perchance, be going to support Davis’s political activities?
It’s good,of course, to see Angela Davis back in the news. But she does make right-wing satire more difficult. How, after all, can her offcial title be improved on? “Professor of the History of Consciousness in the Women of Color Research Cluster.”
