In the first speech for California’s Diablo Valley College’s Social Justice Lecture Series for the 2017-2018 academic year, a Diablo Valley College professor called for the destruction of “white democracy,” painting America as a land dominated by white supremacy while he seemingly tolerated the breaking of the law to abolish the American system.
Albert Ponce opined, “The trajectory of Western Thought … has placed one people supreme above all others. … So we begin with the fact that we exist in a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist system.”
Asking his audience what they thought he meant by white supremacy, Ponce showed pictures of KKK members and white supremacists such as Richard Spencer, then argued that the perception of white supremacy as embodied by those people was incorrect, as it allowed Americans to view white supremacists as errant individuals who hold extremist views, rather than an endemic part of the Western system. “No,” he said, “That is too apologetic for the entire system that emerges beginning in 1492. White supremacy, as we envision it, is a system.”
He continued, “… as we enter kindergarten, we’re taught to get up and pledge allegiance to the flag every single day; a flag that’s not really representative of everybody who’s standing up in that room. Maybe that’s the way it should be taught: All those who this flag represents, stand up, and maybe 50% of this room, you stay sitting down. It’s not for you. That’s factually accurate.”
Ponce said the Constitution “should be called a white man’s constitution still today because that’s what it is. It doesn’t protect people of color.” He lauded Karl Marx, who wrote “The Communist Manifesto,” as “one of the most profound thinkers in the history of western philosophy.”
Ponce asserted of President Trump, “What has driven this individual into the White House, is just an explicit form, the literal, the figurative White House to protect white supremacy.”
While he showed a slide showing a picture of Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions adorned with the phrase, “the abolition of white democracy, Ponce sneered, “It is fitting that a white supremacist of old with a white supremacist today, exist and sit there smiling in the White House.”
Ponce snapped, “No voting’s going to help. No writing your congressperson. We need to smash white supremacy at every institutional level in this country, beginning at the local space, at the state, at the federal system to build something new, and that’s frightening because we don’t know what’s to come. There will be repression, yes, that always happens; but those who are willing, not only to take a knee, that’s just a beginning, that’s just a symbolic peaceful gesture; it’s gonna take a lot more work. … We must abolish it; we must destroy it, and that’s going to take a lot of work and effort.”
During the Q&A following the speech, a student stated, “When we do abolish this white democracy … it will have to be in conflict … where we have to bear arms, where we’d have to go against and do what is illegal.” Ponce answered: “Well, what is illegal in the eyes of the state.”
Video here.