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Mellon Flouts Tax-Exempt Rules by Pouring Millions into Activism
July 2025
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Grace Lee Boggs and the Pathology of Perpetual Process Below |
As the Montpelier exhibit “Mere Distinction of Colour” states, “From mass incarceration to the achievement gap, to housing discrimination, and the vicious cycles of poverty, violence, and lack of opportunity throughout America’s inner cities, the legacies of 200 years of African American bondage are still with us.”
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is bankrolling initiatives, with its eight billion dollar pot of gold, that promote the very idea that America still holds African Americans in bondage and must be punished for its white privilege, white supremacy, and systemic racism.
One of Mellon’s recipients, Project STAND, collects archival documentation of student protest movements in the Black and “under-documented” student populations. But, at times, it has in its employ those who maintain America to be oppressive.
“Project STAND’s” work is vitally important, particularly in this cultural and political moment where academic freedoms are being threatened, student activism is being criminalized, and policies are being enacted against cultural memory work that seeks to illuminate and elevate the histories of people who are marginalized and oppressed,” said Dr. Bergis Jules, a founding member of Shift Collective, a consulting and design group engaged in ‘liberatory’ work.
Mellon is also funding agitation about race through museums. The American Alliance of Museums is responsible for a 2022 report on “Excellence in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion” (DEAI) in museum practice and further claims that museums should “champion an anti-racist movement” to create a “more just and equitable world.” Funding for the report was provided by the Mellon, Alice L. Walton, and Ford Foundations (Report, p. 2)
Current or former incarcerated individuals likewise benefit from Mellon’s generosity. The Foundation believes that the U.S. criminal legal system “dehumanizes, silences, and isolates the tens of millions of people whose lives it touches. By design, it systematically prevents them from leading full civic, creative, and intellectual lives and deprives the public of their voices and perspectives.” Mellon funds, not just content, but “engagement campaigns” to “shift narratives around incarceration.”
Mellon’s vulgar taste in associations is demonstrated through its grants to the activist Center for Economic Research and Social Change or, CERSC, a nonprofit organization that promotes Marxist socialist ideology and anti-Israel content.
“The most notable project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change is Mondoweiss, a far-left anti-Israel blog that has been described by libertarian-leaning law professor David Bernstein as an “Anti-Jewish hate site.”
The Center for Economic Research and Social Change also hosts the annual Socialism Conference, which it says draws around 2,000 attendees annually to Chicago.
CERSC was awarded $1,505,000 in September 2022 and $5,729,000 in December 2024 through the Mellon Foundation’s Presidential Initiatives to create Mellon’s Imagining Freedom Initiative & Writing Freedom Fellowship.
According to its website, the Writing Freedom Fellowship “aims to elevate the necessary voices of poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers impacted by the carceral system…. We believe that supporting writers directly impacted by the carceral system can help make visible the harms of carceral logics.”
Exploring some of Mellon’s Writing Freedom Fellows, we find C. Fausto Cabrera. Cabrera is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and social justice advocate whose work “interrogates the human condition and transcends his 21 years of incarceration.”
Christopher Fausto Cabrera was found guilty in 2004 of first-degree murder while committing a drive-by shooting, second-degree intentional murder, and four counts of attempted first-degree murder under Minnesota law. He writes, “I was a “model inmate” at my pinnacle: running a full-time art department, managing a creative writing program, and facilitating restorative justice initiatives in my spare time.”
After being incarcerated for 13 years, he was considered a security risk and transferred to a prison “reserved for “shot callers” and “undesirables” because he had “too much influence over staff and inmates.”
He received a commutation in 2023 and, as Cabrera put it, “I stepped back into the world as an Artist.”
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is bankrolling initiatives, with its eight billion dollar pot of gold, that promote the very idea that America still holds African Americans in bondage and must be punished for its white privilege, white supremacy, and systemic racism.
One of Mellon’s recipients, Project STAND, collects archival documentation of student protest movements in the Black and “under-documented” student populations. But, at times, it has in its employ those who maintain America to be oppressive.
“Project STAND’s” work is vitally important, particularly in this cultural and political moment where academic freedoms are being threatened, student activism is being criminalized, and policies are being enacted against cultural memory work that seeks to illuminate and elevate the histories of people who are marginalized and oppressed,” said Dr. Bergis Jules, a founding member of Shift Collective, a consulting and design group engaged in ‘liberatory’ work.
Mellon is also funding agitation about race through museums. The American Alliance of Museums is responsible for a 2022 report on “Excellence in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion” (DEAI) in museum practice and further claims that museums should “champion an anti-racist movement” to create a “more just and equitable world.” Funding for the report was provided by the Mellon, Alice L. Walton, and Ford Foundations (Report, p. 2)
Current or former incarcerated individuals likewise benefit from Mellon’s generosity. The Foundation believes that the U.S. criminal legal system “dehumanizes, silences, and isolates the tens of millions of people whose lives it touches. By design, it systematically prevents them from leading full civic, creative, and intellectual lives and deprives the public of their voices and perspectives.” Mellon funds, not just content, but “engagement campaigns” to “shift narratives around incarceration.”
Mellon’s vulgar taste in associations is demonstrated through its grants to the activist Center for Economic Research and Social Change or, CERSC, a nonprofit organization that promotes Marxist socialist ideology and anti-Israel content.
“The most notable project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change is Mondoweiss, a far-left anti-Israel blog that has been described by libertarian-leaning law professor David Bernstein as an “Anti-Jewish hate site.”
The Center for Economic Research and Social Change also hosts the annual Socialism Conference, which it says draws around 2,000 attendees annually to Chicago.
CERSC was awarded $1,505,000 in September 2022 and $5,729,000 in December 2024 through the Mellon Foundation’s Presidential Initiatives to create Mellon’s Imagining Freedom Initiative & Writing Freedom Fellowship.
According to its website, the Writing Freedom Fellowship “aims to elevate the necessary voices of poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers impacted by the carceral system…. We believe that supporting writers directly impacted by the carceral system can help make visible the harms of carceral logics.”
Exploring some of Mellon’s Writing Freedom Fellows, we find C. Fausto Cabrera. Cabrera is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and social justice advocate whose work “interrogates the human condition and transcends his 21 years of incarceration.”
Christopher Fausto Cabrera was found guilty in 2004 of first-degree murder while committing a drive-by shooting, second-degree intentional murder, and four counts of attempted first-degree murder under Minnesota law. He writes, “I was a “model inmate” at my pinnacle: running a full-time art department, managing a creative writing program, and facilitating restorative justice initiatives in my spare time.”
After being incarcerated for 13 years, he was considered a security risk and transferred to a prison “reserved for “shot callers” and “undesirables” because he had “too much influence over staff and inmates.”
He received a commutation in 2023 and, as Cabrera put it, “I stepped back into the world as an Artist.”
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In addition to subsidizing activism in prisons, the Mellon Foundation extends its vast influence to advance social justice and anti-racism projects in as many higher education institutions as possible.
Rutgers University is a recipient of a large chunk of Mellon money for an advanced study of race and social justice to the tune of $15 million. “Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 spurred the creation of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice,” which promotes projects conveying the image that America is still a racist, sexist, selfish, and mean society, one that “today’s enlightened Americans should denigrate and malign.” Executive Director of the Institute, Michelle Stephens, insists that thinkers and writers and scholars “can also be activists whose values and commitments can do real work in the world in influencing how others think, and what they feel compelled to do, for racial justice.” UW Madison received a $5 million award to advance anti-racist practices and pedagogy in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). This project is under the “Just Futures Initiative. UW was one of thirty-eight public, private, historically black, and Latinx-serving institutions receiving grants. “The Just Futures Initiative will expand our collective understanding of our country's history," announced Mellon president Elizabeth Alexander. “The work of these multidisciplinary teams [at these universities] will propose and implement solutions to real social problems, and also mark new milestones in the effort to better capture the contributions of the many different communities that make up the American story." |
Grace Lee Boggs and the Pathology of Perpetual Process
Left-wing activist Grace Lee Boggs lived for change (hence the name of her book) and, therefore, exhorted her followers to engage in constant and never-ending activism. “There is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions.” Change, change, change. But this constant quest for transformation is actually a continual confession of error - the activist’s previous iterations were erroneous - and also an admission that the activist has no principles but is merely engaging in a frenzy of activity with no definable end-state in mind. The Left wants to turn everyone into 24/7 perpetual activists. In their view, schoolkids, journalists, pastors, librarians, and others should not be allowed to lead normal lives. They must be full-time, in-your-face activists haranguing anyone who will listen about an infinite variety of left-wing grievances and causes. This preoccupation with perpetual process is pathological - an incessant instability indicative of mental illness - and that is the rot that Mellon is funding. |
Johns Hopkins University also received a Just Futures $4.4 million grant for a team of scholars to investigate the “history of academic racism in higher education and building a city-wide network to preserve Baltimore’s Black history, culture, and arts.”
Wouldn’t the black community benefit more if Johns Hopkins, known for its legendary medical breakthroughs, used the money to find cures for diseases plaguing their citizens? Just curious.
What are some professors saying about Just Futures and its potential for fighting white supremacy in American universities?
Jigna Desai, a professor of the leftist-oriented gender, women's and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota, noted the racial justice movement following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the surge in calls for universities to account for their histories of white supremacy, slave labor, and settler colonialism: "There’s the renaming of buildings and toppling of statues that have been happening, but there’s also the less visible ways in which racial justice is stymied in universities, whether it’s the devaluating of something like ethnic studies and American Indian studies and the underfunding of those areas or even the ways that slow and bureaucratic processes don’t allow community-engaged work to happen easily."
Elizabeth Hennessy, the project leader and an associate professor of history and environmental sciences at UW Madison, envisions, for example, the development of short courses, such as one in which graduate students in the sciences could spend a few days learning about scientific racism: “…(we need to) ramp up the teaching we do on histories of race in the sciences and medicine.”
Shouldn’t scientists be experts in science, not racial justice and activism?
The Left is obsessed with activism, President Trump and, now, “authoritarianism.” UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) says that President Trump typifies populist authoritarianism like Margaret Thatcher, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French presidential candidate Marine LePen, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. They say Putin is a “pure” authoritarian.
Berkeley claims authoritarians, or, “neo-fascists,” love voter ID laws, assimilation of immigrants, law and order, tough-on-crime policies, borders, and only women in women’s sports, among other “hateful and extreme” measures.
So, how will Berkeley fight Trump, the authoritarian, as they call him? With Mellon money, of course. Thanks to this year’s $2.6 million exploratory grant from the Mellon Foundation, UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and the International Consortium of Critical Theory have created a “counter-imaginary to authoritarianism.”
A counter-imaginary is a “hypothetical construct that proposes an alternative version in opposition to the dominant societal structure for purposes of critiquing current power structures,” according to Berkeley.
The multiyear initiative is entitled “Imagining Beyond Authoritarianism: Race and Gender in Our Times.”
In the description of the project, the typical word salad, featuring leftist buzzwords and dog whistles, dominates the landscape to gin-up useful idiot activists:
“We seek to produce an interconnected sequence of collective projects among academics, curators, artists, and community activists to ask whether the new authoritarianism, what some call neo-fascism, is defined in part by its opposition to the rise of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in education, art, health care, law, and public intellectual life.” “…the "new" authoritarianism takes aim at both "gender ideology" and "critical race theory" and, in so doing, seeks to restrict what is taught in schools, shown in museums, what health care provisions are available, and what may stand as public art and acceptable social history.
"It is our task to produce and sustain a powerful counter-imaginary not only to track and criticize authoritarianism in its current form, but to counter its terrifying phantasms with a powerful imaginary of reparation, livability, and radical equality.”
The project’s venom is spreading. “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, will be undertaken in collaboration with Berkeley’s Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative, and New York University’s Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab.”
The UC initiative will confront “censorship and surveillance that targets academic and artistic freedom, particularly in relation to fields and policies focusing on gender, race, ethnic studies, migration, diversity, and sexuality.”
“We want to consider how a variety of art forms can provide vehicles for connection, deliberation, provocation, and re-imagination,” said UC Berkeley history of art department chair Shannon Jackson. “All sectors need to mobilize right now, including the cultural sector. We are ready to do our part in providing experimental spaces to assemble, to renew, and to model a different kind of future.”
Here's one way Berkeley’s anti-authoritarianism has manifested itself:
Meanwhile, at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, activism reigns.
The Mellon $1 million grant in 2024 will support Lincoln’s recruitment of two new faculty members specializing in Black freedom movements. These hires “will strengthen Lincoln’s offerings in Black history, culture, and activism.” New courses, including a fall seminar on “Black freedom movements and focused spring seminars, will deepen students’ understanding of historical movements such as abolitionism and protest music.”
Student engagement is central to the initiative, with paid internships at organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative and the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center. Annual heritage tours will take students to significant sites like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. These immersive experiences will, supposedly, “deepen their understanding of ongoing struggles for racial justice.”
The initiative will also establish the Lincoln Freedom Award, “recognizing contemporary leaders in Black freedom movements, who will deliver lectures to inspire and educate students.”
The Mellon grant will fund the restoration and preservation of Lincoln’s archival materials documenting its historical role in Black activism.
The scholar-to-activist pipeline is flourishing in the University of California system and beyond, thanks to the Mellon Foundation.
In 2020, the Mellon Foundation handed over to the University of California system $15 million to fund the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program or, PPFP. With these dollars, students and professors are literally being recruited to teach activism and lead movements.
From racial politics to gender-queer studies, the ideologically-driven must apply!
For example, let’s follow the career of a PPFP recipient, LaVelle Ridley, an Ohio State professor. According to the City-Journal, her research, as one speaker bio put it, “focuses on the radical cultural politics of black transgender women . . . and advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda.” After graduate school, “Ridley became a fellow at UC Berkeley through the Mellon-backed PPFP, researching the topic of “black trans insurgency.” In 2024, “she began as a professor of queer and transgender studies at Ohio State, a faculty role created as a part of a series of cluster hires focused on “race, inclusion, and social equity.” “That year, Ridley’s department received a grant from the Mellon Foundation and promised to “prioritize feminist leadership while supporting the critical study of race, gender and sexuality.”
As a professor at Ohio’s flagship university, “Ridley continues to participate in, and benefit from, the Mellon Foundation’s extensive network of activist-inflected, career-advancing programs.”
By the way, the Mellon Foundation considers PPFP a “proof of concept” and “a model for inclusive hiring nationwide.”
Yet another university gets in on the act, fighting for “gender affirming care.” Activists who wish to fight laws restricting “gender” medical treatments can do so at the University of Kansas through its Trans Studies at the Commons project funded with a 2024 $1 million grant from Mellon.
San Francisco’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society is another beneficiary, receiving $1.5 million in 2024 to start a program called Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service - aptly known as (TENTACLES).
TENTACLES creator, Susan Stryker, described its purpose as putting Mellon’s money “in the pockets of people who are doing really grassroots, community-based activism....”
Two TENTACLES scholars in the UC system are Jemma Decristo and Dan Bustillo. Bustillo researches “trans Latinx activist media” at UC Riverside. Decristo is a professor at UC Davis, and as of January of this year, was still being investigated by UC Davis for posting threats against “zionist” journalists.
And, one of the most notorious of institutions for its activism, the one making the headlines for its antisemitic violence on campus, Columbia University, has adopted a curriculum whose goal is “to increase learning about the history of racial injustices and encourage students and participants to re-imagine a more fair and just society without jails and prisons.” The Curriculum is called Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy paid for by the Mellon Foundation.
This course explores “how the country can move from a punitive paradigm to a new paradigm that favors instead education and well-being, one that has abolished prisons, police, and the death penalty, as well as borders, the wage, capital, and other systems and structures that stand in the way of equal human flourishing and liberation,” according to the syllabus.
It is quite frightening to imagine how this activist mentality created out of these activist programs and projects will manifest themselves – all funded by Mellon.
Conclusion
It is unfortunate that the Mellon Foundation chooses to spend its fortune on teaching about past injustices, grievance, and activism and not on unifying disciplines that will benefit students with prosperous futures. Mellon should use its grand platform and monetary largesse to prevent incarceration, for example, and to create “just futures” for American youth through humanity grants to projects such as Pastor Corey Brooks’ Project H.O.O.D. - Helping Others Obtain Destiny - in Chicago.
Mellon must forsake activism, return to its roots of advancing knowledge, and abandon its current path of purposeful efforts to create animosity and division.
Wouldn’t the black community benefit more if Johns Hopkins, known for its legendary medical breakthroughs, used the money to find cures for diseases plaguing their citizens? Just curious.
What are some professors saying about Just Futures and its potential for fighting white supremacy in American universities?
Jigna Desai, a professor of the leftist-oriented gender, women's and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota, noted the racial justice movement following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the surge in calls for universities to account for their histories of white supremacy, slave labor, and settler colonialism: "There’s the renaming of buildings and toppling of statues that have been happening, but there’s also the less visible ways in which racial justice is stymied in universities, whether it’s the devaluating of something like ethnic studies and American Indian studies and the underfunding of those areas or even the ways that slow and bureaucratic processes don’t allow community-engaged work to happen easily."
Elizabeth Hennessy, the project leader and an associate professor of history and environmental sciences at UW Madison, envisions, for example, the development of short courses, such as one in which graduate students in the sciences could spend a few days learning about scientific racism: “…(we need to) ramp up the teaching we do on histories of race in the sciences and medicine.”
Shouldn’t scientists be experts in science, not racial justice and activism?
The Left is obsessed with activism, President Trump and, now, “authoritarianism.” UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) says that President Trump typifies populist authoritarianism like Margaret Thatcher, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French presidential candidate Marine LePen, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. They say Putin is a “pure” authoritarian.
Berkeley claims authoritarians, or, “neo-fascists,” love voter ID laws, assimilation of immigrants, law and order, tough-on-crime policies, borders, and only women in women’s sports, among other “hateful and extreme” measures.
So, how will Berkeley fight Trump, the authoritarian, as they call him? With Mellon money, of course. Thanks to this year’s $2.6 million exploratory grant from the Mellon Foundation, UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and the International Consortium of Critical Theory have created a “counter-imaginary to authoritarianism.”
A counter-imaginary is a “hypothetical construct that proposes an alternative version in opposition to the dominant societal structure for purposes of critiquing current power structures,” according to Berkeley.
The multiyear initiative is entitled “Imagining Beyond Authoritarianism: Race and Gender in Our Times.”
In the description of the project, the typical word salad, featuring leftist buzzwords and dog whistles, dominates the landscape to gin-up useful idiot activists:
“We seek to produce an interconnected sequence of collective projects among academics, curators, artists, and community activists to ask whether the new authoritarianism, what some call neo-fascism, is defined in part by its opposition to the rise of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in education, art, health care, law, and public intellectual life.” “…the "new" authoritarianism takes aim at both "gender ideology" and "critical race theory" and, in so doing, seeks to restrict what is taught in schools, shown in museums, what health care provisions are available, and what may stand as public art and acceptable social history.
"It is our task to produce and sustain a powerful counter-imaginary not only to track and criticize authoritarianism in its current form, but to counter its terrifying phantasms with a powerful imaginary of reparation, livability, and radical equality.”
The project’s venom is spreading. “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, will be undertaken in collaboration with Berkeley’s Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative, and New York University’s Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab.”
The UC initiative will confront “censorship and surveillance that targets academic and artistic freedom, particularly in relation to fields and policies focusing on gender, race, ethnic studies, migration, diversity, and sexuality.”
“We want to consider how a variety of art forms can provide vehicles for connection, deliberation, provocation, and re-imagination,” said UC Berkeley history of art department chair Shannon Jackson. “All sectors need to mobilize right now, including the cultural sector. We are ready to do our part in providing experimental spaces to assemble, to renew, and to model a different kind of future.”
Here's one way Berkeley’s anti-authoritarianism has manifested itself:
- SLOW DARK DANCES | 1 PM, 5 PM At Berkeley!
“…slow dark dances builds on legacies of Black joy as a form of resistance, and seeks to un-colonize the “invisible” whiteness of museum spaces.
Meanwhile, at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, activism reigns.
The Mellon $1 million grant in 2024 will support Lincoln’s recruitment of two new faculty members specializing in Black freedom movements. These hires “will strengthen Lincoln’s offerings in Black history, culture, and activism.” New courses, including a fall seminar on “Black freedom movements and focused spring seminars, will deepen students’ understanding of historical movements such as abolitionism and protest music.”
Student engagement is central to the initiative, with paid internships at organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative and the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center. Annual heritage tours will take students to significant sites like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. These immersive experiences will, supposedly, “deepen their understanding of ongoing struggles for racial justice.”
The initiative will also establish the Lincoln Freedom Award, “recognizing contemporary leaders in Black freedom movements, who will deliver lectures to inspire and educate students.”
The Mellon grant will fund the restoration and preservation of Lincoln’s archival materials documenting its historical role in Black activism.
The scholar-to-activist pipeline is flourishing in the University of California system and beyond, thanks to the Mellon Foundation.
In 2020, the Mellon Foundation handed over to the University of California system $15 million to fund the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program or, PPFP. With these dollars, students and professors are literally being recruited to teach activism and lead movements.
From racial politics to gender-queer studies, the ideologically-driven must apply!
For example, let’s follow the career of a PPFP recipient, LaVelle Ridley, an Ohio State professor. According to the City-Journal, her research, as one speaker bio put it, “focuses on the radical cultural politics of black transgender women . . . and advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda.” After graduate school, “Ridley became a fellow at UC Berkeley through the Mellon-backed PPFP, researching the topic of “black trans insurgency.” In 2024, “she began as a professor of queer and transgender studies at Ohio State, a faculty role created as a part of a series of cluster hires focused on “race, inclusion, and social equity.” “That year, Ridley’s department received a grant from the Mellon Foundation and promised to “prioritize feminist leadership while supporting the critical study of race, gender and sexuality.”
As a professor at Ohio’s flagship university, “Ridley continues to participate in, and benefit from, the Mellon Foundation’s extensive network of activist-inflected, career-advancing programs.”
By the way, the Mellon Foundation considers PPFP a “proof of concept” and “a model for inclusive hiring nationwide.”
Yet another university gets in on the act, fighting for “gender affirming care.” Activists who wish to fight laws restricting “gender” medical treatments can do so at the University of Kansas through its Trans Studies at the Commons project funded with a 2024 $1 million grant from Mellon.
San Francisco’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society is another beneficiary, receiving $1.5 million in 2024 to start a program called Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service - aptly known as (TENTACLES).
TENTACLES creator, Susan Stryker, described its purpose as putting Mellon’s money “in the pockets of people who are doing really grassroots, community-based activism....”
Two TENTACLES scholars in the UC system are Jemma Decristo and Dan Bustillo. Bustillo researches “trans Latinx activist media” at UC Riverside. Decristo is a professor at UC Davis, and as of January of this year, was still being investigated by UC Davis for posting threats against “zionist” journalists.
And, one of the most notorious of institutions for its activism, the one making the headlines for its antisemitic violence on campus, Columbia University, has adopted a curriculum whose goal is “to increase learning about the history of racial injustices and encourage students and participants to re-imagine a more fair and just society without jails and prisons.” The Curriculum is called Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy paid for by the Mellon Foundation.
This course explores “how the country can move from a punitive paradigm to a new paradigm that favors instead education and well-being, one that has abolished prisons, police, and the death penalty, as well as borders, the wage, capital, and other systems and structures that stand in the way of equal human flourishing and liberation,” according to the syllabus.
It is quite frightening to imagine how this activist mentality created out of these activist programs and projects will manifest themselves – all funded by Mellon.
Conclusion
It is unfortunate that the Mellon Foundation chooses to spend its fortune on teaching about past injustices, grievance, and activism and not on unifying disciplines that will benefit students with prosperous futures. Mellon should use its grand platform and monetary largesse to prevent incarceration, for example, and to create “just futures” for American youth through humanity grants to projects such as Pastor Corey Brooks’ Project H.O.O.D. - Helping Others Obtain Destiny - in Chicago.
Mellon must forsake activism, return to its roots of advancing knowledge, and abandon its current path of purposeful efforts to create animosity and division.