UCLA Student President Displayed A Gang Sign In A Photograph Years Ago. Left Goes Nuts.

University of California Los Angeles’ Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC) president Danny Siegel caught considerable heat from the student body when students discovered an old photograph of him throwing up the Bloods gang symbol. The Bloods, one of the two most infamous predominantly black gangs founded in Los Angeles, are known for their rivalry with the Crips and for creating considerable havoc through drug trafficking, gun crime, and various other societal ills in our nation beginning in the 1970’s. Once students caught wind of Siegel’s photograph and students accused him of being insensitive to those who suffered from gang violence, Siegel issued an apology on Facebook, which included the following words:

This is a result of my white privilege and lack of perspective, something that so many victims of gang violence don’t have the luxury of, in fact this behavior can put their lives at risk. … I should have known better and take full responsibility for my insensitivity.

He also said the following to The Daily Bruin:

I obviously take full responsibility for this. I regret it, I don’t want to say because it’s become public, but because students, whether they themselves or their families have been victims of gang violence, that’s something that I disrespected and I’m very aware of.

Despite the numerous apologies, various students still called for his resignation. Robert Gardner, a senior at UCLA studying Political Science and African American studies, accused Siegel of mocking the oppression that black Americans experienced while claiming that black Americans joined gangs for both income and protection:

When a white person throws up the gang sign, they’re basically making a mockery of the oppression that African Americans in hyper-segregated neighborhoods face. A lot of black Bruins are extremely upset at this appropriation of our culture … that’s derived out of anti-black racism.

Amy Shao, who is the USAC Cultural Affairs commissioner, said that Siegel has the privilege to ignore issues surrounding gang violence because he is not a person of color. NJ Omorogieva, a sophomore at UCLA, said that Siegel should have realized that what he was doing was wrong.

By leftist logic, whites using gang symbols is an example of cultural appropriation of black culture. This logically implies that gang activity is central to black culture along with the thuggery, the violence, the criminality, and all of the other societal ills that come with it. This effectively cheapens other aspects of black culture in which African-Americans made substantial contributions to the United States, whether it was Frederick Douglass or Thurgood Marshall.

While issues of rent control segregated neighborhoods, and the societal ills that came with them are relevant to the story of the African-American community, it seems illogical that the Left seems more interested in a narrative of victimhood rather than of remarkable advancement since the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. In this circumstance, a naive gesture by a student is considered an egregious sin against the black community when nothing pales to what the Democratic Party ever did from slavery to Jim Crow.

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