* Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University
* Former Associate Professor of Education and Anthropology at Columbia University’s Teachers College
* Self-described “revolutionary”
* Views America and Israel as racist nations
* Supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement
* Admires Fidel Castro, Ward Churchill, Van Jones, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Rasmea Odeh, Assata Shakur, & Mumia Abu Jamal
Born in 1978 in Philadelphia and subsequently raised in Philadelphia, Marc Lamont Hill holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral thesis was titled, “(Re)negotiating Knowledge, Power, and Identities in Hip -Hop Lit.” His Abstract of that thesis read as follows:
“This ethnographic study contributes to the growing body of literature in cultural studies and critical pedagogy by showing how knowledge, power, and student interpretations are negotiated and renegotiated as hip-hop culture becomes a part of the official curriculum in ‘Hip-Hop Lit,’ a hip-hop centered English literature class that I co-taught at ‘Howard High School.’ In this study, I highlight the complex relationships that the students and teachers in Hip-Hop Lit forged with the texts and each other through various forms of identity work and the intersections of in-school and out-of-school pedagogy. Further, I demonstrate how these relationships facilitated the reconfigured roles of student, teacher, and researcher within the classroom.”
From 2005-2009, Hill was an Assistant Professor of Urban Education and American Studies at Temple University. In the fall of 2009 he became an Associate Professor of Education and Anthropology at Columbia University‘s Teachers College; he also holds an affiliated faculty appointment at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies. From 2007-2009 Hill was a frequent guest commentator on the Fox News Channel, which then hired him in the fall of 2009 as a paid “analyst” at a cost of $30,000 to $40,000 per year. Hill left Teachers College in 2014 to become Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College. In 2017 he returned to Temple University as the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions.
A self-described “revolutionary,” Hill professes to have once belonged to an organization known as the Ansaaru Allah Community, an Islamic sect whose doctrines resemble those of the Nation of Islam. Hill blogs regularly at TheRoot.com and MarcLamontHill.com. By his own account, he is an expert on “hip-hop culture,” i.e., rap music. He is the author of the 2009 book Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity.
Hill works closely with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Drug Reform Project (DRP), which contends that the criminal-justice system’s use of drug informants is riddled with corruption. “Too often,” says the DRP, “informants are pressured into lying at the expense of innocent people in order to save their own skin.” Notably, the ACLU favors the legalization of all drugs.
In 2006, when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro failed to attend a national celebration of his 80th birthday (and news reports rumored that he was ill), a concerned Dr. Hill wrote in his blog:
“El Comandante was not in attendance. While a no-show at this type of event is curious for any leader, it is unthinkable for Fidel, who thrives on such moments. In fact, the only thing that could keep him away is the very thing that scares me the most: Fidel was too sick to attend.”
In a 2007 appearance on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor, Hill defended professor Ward Churchill, who had recently been fired from his job at the University of Colorado. Churchill was the author of a post-9/11 essay asserting that the victims who had died in the World Trade Center were akin to “little Eichmanns” [a reference to Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”] who, as a consequence of their status as faceless cogs in America’s allegedly destructive capitalist economy, had essentially brought the terrorist attacks upon themselves. The controversy that resulted from that essay led to an investigation which ultimately revealed Churchill to be a plagiarist unqualified to teach in his specialty. Said Hill about Churchill’s firing:
“This is a really sad day for American academic life and American public life. Ward Churchill should not have been fired. This has been about free speech from the beginning…. A witch hunt began the moment that he made those comments about the 9/11 victims. And regardless of what we think about his comments, he has the right to make them. In fact, he has the responsibility to make them as an academic if he believes them to be true … and if he can empirically substantiate them, and I think he’s done that…. When you look at his ‘Little Eichmann’ comment, he’s explained this. He was referring to Hannah Arendt, on of the great theorists of our time, in which he was saying that often times, the big bad person that you think is this crazy killer is actually an ordinary technocrat, someone in a building who pushes buttons, who does things without any sort of sensibility about how bad they are. And he’s saying that many times the people who were in that building may have been advancing an American global financial empire without any thinking about it. And I don’t necessarily agree that we should be indifferent to their suffering. I happen to be a little more sympathetic to the victims and their families than Ward Churchill is, but he certainly had a valid point, number one, and number two he has a right to say it and we have to defend that. …”
When Bill O’Reilly subsequently took issue with what he called Churchill’s “Little Nazis”comment, Hill replied: “He [Churchill] didn’t say Little Nazis … Not Little Nazis, Little Eichmanns…. That’s different than calling them Nazis. He added context and texture to it.” Hill then proceeded to say that academia “is filled with … people who, through their scholarship, reinforce notions of white supremacism, of racism, of sexism, of homophobia.” As an example of such a figure, he cited Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve.
In January 2008 Hill took exception to President George W. Bush’s characterization, during an interview, of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Said Bush (about Obama):
“He’s an attractive guy. He’s articulate. I’ve been impressed with him when I’ve seen him in person. But he’s got a long way to go to be President.”
In Hill’s estimation, Bush’s assessment was tinged with racism:
“Unfortunately when [the word] ‘articulate’ is used by white people toward black people, it’s often accompanied by a sense of bewilderment and surprise; i.e., ‘I’m surprised that you’re able to speak that well.’ Coming from someone like President Bush in particular, it’s a bit curious. He’s the same person who said that he rails against the soft bigotry of low expectations. And then he hurls such a lowball compliment at Barack Obama. To me, if Barack Obama could not speak articulately, if he could not express his ideas, that would be noteworthy…. The fact of the matter is we live in a world where black intelligence is called into question even at the highest levels.”
In February 2008 Hill denounced “the triple threat of global racism, poverty, and militarism” that he saw as by-products of American domestic and foreign policies. He then lamented that presidential candidate Obama, should he ultimately win the presidency, might not turn out to be “the revolutionary outsider that he’s portrayed to be.” Complained Hill: “Obama has been conspicuously silent on topics such as the prison-industrial complex, the Zionist occupation of Palestine, and the economic underdevelopment of Africa.”
In one O’Reilly Factor appearance in March 2009, Hill told host Bill O’Reilly that President Obama’s redistributive economic policies would help most Americans: “[F]or the last 20 years, we’ve had wealth redistribution. It’s just gone from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
That same month, Hill defended a group of black militants from the Uhuru Movement, an African socialist organization that seeks to restore “Black Power in the 21st Century” and to “destroy imperialism and liberate Africa and her children dispersed throughout the world.” The aforementioned militants were holding a vigil in honor of the late Lovelle Mixon, a career criminal who had murdered four Oakland, California police officers before being killed himself in a shootout with police. According to Hill, this case of “white officers” and “black bodies” had stoked the protesters’ long-festering resentments toward what they perceived to be “a repressive and oppressive police state” where “police terrorism” was commonplace. The demonstrators, said Hill, understood that Mixon’s “fundamental humanity” was no less authentic than that of the officers whom he had killed.
Until late September 2009, Hill’s “Twitter” webpage was wallpapered with the image of one of his heroes, Assata Shakur — a fugitive (formerly known as Joanne Chesimard) convicted of the 1973 execution-style murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. In 1979 Shakur, with help from members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army (BLA), escaped from prison and fled to Cuba, where she has been given political asylum ever since by Fidel and Raul Castro. Though the FBI is currently offering a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to Shakur’s apprehension, Hill has referred to the fugitive as “an American hero and freedom fighter”; he has vowed to “always stand next to her.”
Also in September of 2009, Hill’s website featured an article, under Hill’s own photo and byline, which said:
“Fortunately, with the help of her comrades and the ancestors, Assata was able to escape the belly of the beast in 1979 and emerge safely in Cuba, where she’s been granted protection as a political prisoner. Despite the relentless efforts of the federal and state [U.S.] government, she remains safe in one of the last remaining palenques [runaway locations where Africans can find safe haven] on Earth.” [The term “ancestors,” which Hill has often used to refer to important black historical figures, is presumably a reference to members of the BLA.]
Professing his belief in Assata Shakur’s innocence, Hill called the cop-killer “one of the great heroes in the Black Freedom Struggle” and proclaimed: “Mother Assata, I am eternally grateful for your life and example. I give thanks to the ancestors for you. I pray for your continued protection and pledge to support you and our people until I die.” Hill signed his tribute: “In Beautiful Struggle, Marc.”
In September 2009, when President Obama’s green jobs czar Van Jones was forced to resign amid controversy over his longstanding communist ties and anti-American views, Hill defended Jones, saying:
“[I]t’s so disappointing that the Obama administration didn’t fight for Van Jones. They put him up there. They hired the guy. And then throw him under the bus when it’s politically expedient. It’s very disappointing.”
Hill has characterized the late black separatist and racist Khalid Abdul Muhammad (who died of a brain aneurysm in 2001) as a “mentor, teacher, and revolutionary hero” who, contrary to “media attempts to portray him as a hate monger,” was most notable for his “profound love for Black people.” “I love you and miss you Dr. Khallid,” Hill wrote on his website. Contending that Muhammad’s death “was an assassination rather than an accident,” Hill declared proudly, “I believe that my work also follows in the tradition of Dr. Khallid’s revolutionary struggle for Black liberation.”
On his MySpace webpage, Hill identified Assata Shakur, Fidel Castro, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal as people whom he would like to meet personally.
In March 2008, Hill introduced Mumia, who had previously been an occasional guest blogger on Hill’s website, as a new regular contributor to the site:
“I am thrilled to announce that Mumia Abu-Jamal has joined the Barbershop as a weekly contributor!! His column, ‘Live From Death Row,’ will appear every Wednesday starting next week.”
Hill described Mumia as “one of the world’s most celebrated journalists, freedom fighters, and political prisoners” who, though “wrongfully incarcerated since 1981 for the murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner,” had nonetheless “devoted his life to Black liberation” and had “generated international support for his own case, which has been one of the most glaring and repugnant reflections of the criminal (in)justice system.” “Welcome Brother Mumia!!!!” Hill said.
In late September and early October of 2009, a number of conservative bloggers — expressing opposition to Fox News’ decision to hire a paid analyst who held such radical views — drew public attention to Hill’s affiliations and past statements. In response, the professor quickly removed the pictures of Assata Shakur from the background of his Twitter webpage and replaced them with photos of boxing great Muhammad Ali.
In early October 2009 Hill commented on the case of film director Roman Polanski, who had recently been arrested by Swiss police in connection to a crime he had committed three decades earlier — the rape and sodmization of a 13-year-old girl (after which he fled to Europe). Hill saw Polanski’s story as a testament to America’s deep-seated sexism, classism, and racism:
“Isn’t it safe to say that Roman Polanski has only been free all these years because he’s white? First and foremost, we live in a society that doesn’t take the protection of female bodies seriously. Part of the reason why 60 percent of sexual offenses against women go unreported is because of the indifference that many Americans, both men and women, have to rape. Another issue is class, as poor people rarely have the legal means or financial opportunity to escape in the manner that Polanksi did. Another issue is the power of celebrity, which allows many people to see Polanski as a world-class director rather than a child rapist. Is race a factor as well? Of course. After all, it’s safe to say that, in the exact same circumstances, Spike Lee would have been extradited decades ago. Still, race is not the biggest factor.”
In the fall of 2009 Hill came to the defense of employees at four separate ACORN offices who had been secretly videotaped counseling undercover journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles — who were posing as a pimp and a prostitute — on how the pair could evade the law and engage successfully in tax fraud, money laundering, human trafficking, and the establishment of an underage prostitution ring staffed by illegal aliens. Hill falsely told Fox News that the undercover journalists had visited “dozens, if not hundreds” of ACORN offices and were able to find unethical employees in only four of them. But the website BigGovernment.com, which worked closely with O’Keefe and Giles, corrected him:
“This is not true. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles did not go to ‘hundreds of ACORN offices’ to acquire material for this project. They went to the four offices that were shown in the series of videos.… The accusations by Marc Lamont Hill are completely false.”
On his publicly available Curriculum Vitae, Hill proudly includes a lecture on “The Importance of Ideological Training in the New Millenium (sic),” which he delivered at the Polymathematic University in Pennsylvania — a self-described “revolutionary center for the training and development of professional revolutionaries.” The event was sponsored by the “Poor Righteous Communist Party,” a Maoist group that seeks to develop “an ever glorious Righteous Communism.”
On October 16, 2009, Fox News Channel fired Hill from his analyst post as a result of shareholder concerns about his “reputation of defending cop killers and racists.”
Hill once condemned Israel’s military response to a 2012 incident where Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped and murdered three Israeli boys. “This starts with occupation,” said Hill. “There’s an apartheid state in Gaza. There’s an apartheid state in the region. That’s what we need to talk about. That’s what starts as resistance. It’s not terrorism.”
On Columbus Day 2012, Hill published an op-ed in which he listed the “15 most overrated white people.” Wrote Hill:
“Today, our nation engages in one of its most bizarre cultural rituals: the celebration of Columbus Day as a national holiday. Although history proves that Christopher Columbus was an immoral treasure hunter who merely stumbled upon a region that had already been ‘discovered’ by indigenous non-whites, we continue to praise the vicious conquistador as a hero. To honor the true spirit of Columbus Day, I have created my own list of overrated white people. Of course, this list is not exhaustive, as there are countless other White people who are equally underwhelming.”
Some excerpts from the list include the following:
Four months later, Hill made some controversial remarks regarding Christopher Dorner, an African American who had served as a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer from 2007 until he was terminated for poor performance in 2008. Some background: In early February 2013 Dorner vowed to kill as many LAPD officers as possible. He then proceeded to murder one police officer as well as an LAPD captain’s daughter and her fiancee. Prior to embarking on his killing spree, Dorner released a lengthy, rambling manifesto complaining about the LAPD’s allegedly rampant racism and brutality, and lauding a number of (mostly) leftists such as Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Matthews, Soledad O’Brien, Wolf Blitzer, Tavis Smiley, and Anderson Cooper. On February 13, Dorner shot and killed himself after police had traced him to a mountain cabin in Angelus Oaks, California.
Against this backdrop, Hill, shortly after Dorner’s death, said the following:
“This has been an important conversation that we’ve had about police brutality, about police corruption, about state violence. They were even talking about making him the first domestic drone target. This is serious business here…. And as far as Dorner himself goes, he’s been like a real life superhero to many people. Now don’t get me wrong. What he did was awful, killing innocent people was bad, but when you read his manifesto, when you read the message that he left, he wasn’t entirely crazy. He had a plan and a mission here. And many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people. They are rooting for somebody who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching Django Unchained in real life. It’s kind of exciting.”
Hill was incensed by an August 2014 incident where Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed an 18-year-old black male named Michael Brown in an altercation that occurred just minutes after Brown had perpetrated a strong-armed robbery of a local convenience store. Brown’s death set off a massive wave of protests and riots in Ferguson, and eventually grew into a national movement denouncing an alleged epidemic of police brutality against African Americans. Hill used his Twitter account to state: “A Black man in America is killed every 28 hours by police or vigilantes. THAT, not rioting, is domestic terrorism…” Michael Brown, added Hill, was “yet another teenager executed for being young, black, and outside.”
In August 2014, Hill denounced Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile system, which had been put in place to intercept the many deadly rockets which Gaza-based Hamas terrorists had long been firing into Israel. Said Hill: “But what the Iron Dome does is it also takes away all of Hamas’s military leverage, which is very different than say, 10 years ago or 15 years ago in other wars like Lebanon, et cetera. As a result, it not only serves a defensive purpose but de facto serves an offensive purpose. It allows Israel to essentially assault and siege Gaza without any retribution or response on the other side. So again, to some extent, they are not just funding defense, they are funding an offensive war and ultimately an occupation. That for me, is the problem.”
On April 27, 2015—while the city of Baltimore was being overrun by riots in the aftermath of unsubstantiated allegations that white police officers had brutalized and killed a local black criminal named Freddie Gray—Hill defended the rioters, saying their “rebellion” was an understandable reaction to many years of abuse and oppression:
“No, there shouldn’t be calm tonight. Black people are dying in the streets. They’ve been dying in the streets for months, years, decades, centuries. I think there can be resistance to oppression and when resistance occurs, you can’t circumscribe resistance. You can’t schedule a planned resistance. You can’t tell people where to die in, where to resist, how to resist and how to protest. Now, I think there should be an ethics attached to this, but we have to watch our own ethics and be careful not to get more upset about the destruction of property than the destruction of black bodies and that seems to be to me—to me what’s happening over the last few hours and that’s very troublesome to me.
“We also have to be very careful about the language we use to talk about this. I’m not calling these people rioters. I’m calling these uprisings and I think it’s an important distinction to make. This is not a riot. There have been uprisings in major cities and smaller cities around this country for the last year because of the violence against black female and male bodies forever and I think that’s what important here…. We can’t ignore the fact that the city is burning, but we need to be talking about why it’s burning and not romanticize peace and not romanticize marching as the only way to function. I’m not saying we should be hurting, I’m not saying we should be killing people, but we do have to understand that resistance looks different ways to different people and part of what it means to say black lives matter, is to assert our right to have rage—righteous rage, righteous indignation in the face of state violence and extrajudicial killing. Freddie Gray is dead. That’s why the city is burning and let’s make that clear. It’s not burning because of these protesters. The city is burning because the police killed Freddie Gray and that’s a distinction we have to make….
“I’m not saying we should see the destruction of black communities as positive. I’m saying that we can’t have too narrow a perception of what the destruction of black communities mean and it seems we exhausted more of our moral outrage tonight and not the 364 days before tonight. I think we should be strategic in how we riot…. What I’m saying is we can’t pathologize people who, after decades and centuries of police terrorism, have decided to respond in this way and when we use the language of thugs, when we use the language of riots, we make it seem as if it’s this pathological, dysfunctional, counter-productive [phenomenon].”
In a November 8, 2015 appearance on CNN, Hill ridiculed black Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson for claiming to have turned his own life around with the help of God, rather than with the help of government. Said Hill:
“I mean, Ben Carson — the greatest lie in American history is the myth of the self-made person. Nobody makes themselves. We’re all shaped by communities, by people who struggled and sacrificed for us, by governments that offer safety nets. And what Ben Carson is able to do essentially is reject all that stuff and say that I [he] was saved…. Ben Carson is able to say, ‘I was saved by Jesus and hard work.’ That allows him to reject a safety net. That allows him to push back against the expansion of a welfare state. That allows him to resist tax cuts for the middle class and poor and tax hikes for the wealthy. It allows him to create an entire narrative where people say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, why are you doing this?’ Ben Carson can say, ‘Hey, because I did it myself,’ and it makes white voters feel comfortable to say that, ‘Look, this black guy himself is telling me poor people … (inaudible).”
Hill has long maintained that Israel is chiefly responsible for the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and that “blaming the Palestinian Authority for violence in the region is dishonest and unproductive.” He denies that radical Islam in any way contributes to Arab-Israeli hostilities. And he supports the Palestinian “right of return” – a position which would lead to the demographic destruction of the State of Israel.
Hill strongly supports the “Ferguson to Palestine” movement which tries to draw parallels between: (a) purported Israeli transgressions, and (b) the alleged police racism that resulted in the fatal August 2014 shooting of an African American teenager named Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In short, the movement depicts both black Americans and Palestinian Arabs as victims of racist oppression.
In January 2015, Hill was part of a delegation to Israel and the West Bank, whose objective was to publicly draw a parallel between alleged Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the Middle East, and police violence against blacks in the United States. The others in the delegation were Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors; five members of Dream Defenders (Phillip Agnew, Ciara Taylor, Steven Pargett, Sherika Shaw, Ahmad Abuznaid); Tef Poe and Tara Thompson from Ferguson/Hands Up United;Cherrell Brown and Carmen Perez of the Justice League NYC; Charlene Carruthers from the Black Youth Project; poet and artist Aja Monet; and USC doctoral student Maytha Alhassen. Once he was in the West Bank, Hill issued the following video statement about the trip: “We came here to Palestine to stand in love and revolutionary struggle with our brothers and sisters. We come to a land that has been stolen by greed and destroyed by hate. We come here and we learn laws that have been co-signed in ink but written in the blood of the innocent and we stand next to people who continue to courageously struggle and resist the occupation. People continue to dream and fight for freedom. From Ferguson to Palestine the struggle for freedom continues.”
In October 2015, Hill wrote in the Huffington Post a defense of Rasmea Odeh, mastermind of a February 1969 supermarket bombing in Jerusalem in which members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had murdered two young Jewish men. As author Ari Lieberman writes: “Odeh and her gang were apprehended days [after the bombing] by Israeli police. Physical evidence obtained at the scene undeniably linked her to the crime and she confessed to her role almost immediately. Odeh was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in a prisoner swap after serving just ten years. Following her release, she lived in Lebanon for four years and then moved to Jordan. From Jordan, she moved to the United States.” In addition to her involvement in the Jerusalem bombing, Odeh was also convicted of trying to blow up a British consulate. But according to Hill, Odeh is a “Palestinian freedom fighter” whose conviction by Israel “was allegedly based on a false confession made by Odeh after over 20 days of vicious rape, and other physical and psychological torture.”
On June 7, 2016, Hill tweeted: “Israel is very much, by definition, an apartheid state.” Also in 2016, Hill, a defender of boycotts against Israel, criticized New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s initiative to stop such measures.
In a July 2016 interview on CNN, Hill said it was “bizarre” for anyone to suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement was racist, explaining that “black people don’t have the institutional power to be racist or to deploy racism.”
During a January 16, 2017 appearance on a CNN panel hosted by Don Lemon, Hill took issue with President-elect Donald Trump hosting notable black sports stars and celebrities like Ray Lewis, Jim Brown, and Steve Harvey to meet with him at Trump Tower:
“I love Steve Harvey and I have respect for Steve Harvey and I think his intentions were accurate — or appropriate rather, but my disagreement is the way in which he’s being used by folk like Donald Trump. Again, his intention is just to have a seat at the table. But when you’re at the table, you should have experts at the table. You should have people who can challenge the president at the table. … Because all — because they keep bringing up comedians and actors and athletes to represent black interests is demeaning, it’s disrespectful, and it’s condescending. Bring some people up there with some expertise, Donald Trump, don’t just bring up people to entertain. Unless Steve Harvey turns into a policy analyst in the behind the scenes meetings, it doesn’t matter what I was — I’m saying, my concern is who — the people he’s trumpeting up and putting in front of the cameras.”
After Bruce LeVell – an African American member of Trump’s diversity coalition – objected to Hill’s remarks, Hill characterized him and all other nonwhites who were working on behalf of Trump’s agenda as “a bunch of mediocre Negroes being dragged in front of TV as a photo-op for Donald Trump’s exploitative campaign against black people.”
In November 2017, Hill tweeted: “Trump’s position on Israel/Palestine is repugnant. His call for Palestine to ‘reject hatred and terrorism’ is offensive and counterproductive.”
In September 2018, Hill was a guest speaker at a conference sponsored by the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (formerly known as the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation), a leading advocate of the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In the course of his remarks, Hill counseled his audience to avoid adopting “a civil rights tradition which romanticizes nonviolence. That’s the challenge … that’s the challenge. It romanticizes nonviolence, but how can you romanticize nonviolence when you have a state [Israel] that is at all moments waging war against you, against your bodies, poisoning your water, limiting your access to water, locking up your children, killing you?” At another point, he lamented that “we have allowed this nonviolent thing to become so normative that we’re undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways.”
On November 28, 2018, Hill addressed the opening meeting of the United Nations‘ annual commemoration of the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” Stating that “[t]his year marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba” — the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” in reference to Israel’s creation in 1948 — Hill said that “[t]he Israeli nation continues to restrict freedom” and “deny citizenship rights to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish”; that the “Israeli criminal justice system” was a “term I can only use with irony,” as “Palestinians are routinely denied due process of law”; that Israel had transformed Gaza into “the world’s largest open-air prison”; and that nations worldwide should participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a means of crippling Israel economically. movement against Israel until it allow a Palestinian State on the pre-1967 borders and allow the so-called ‘right of return.’
Also in the course of his remarks, Hill stated: “As an American I’m embarrassed that my tax dollars contribute to this reality. No American president has taken a principled stand for Palestinian rights. I’m saddened though not surprised that Trump has further emboldened Israel’s behavior.” He asserted that Trump’s recently announced recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and his initiative to relocate America’s embassy in Israel to that city, constituted a “powerful provocation” and a “death knell” for the peace process. “Donald Trump is not an exception to American policy,” Hill lamented, “but rather he is a more transparent and aggressive iteration of it.”
Perhaps most notably, Hill explicitly made the case that violence against Israel was a legitimate form of resistance. Noting that “contrary to western mythology, black resistance to American apartheid was not” entirely nonviolent, he said: “Tactics otherwise divergent from Dr. King or Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom. If we are in true solidarity, we must allow them the same range of opportunity and political possibility. We must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend themselves. We must prioritize peace, but we must not romanticize or fetishize it. We must promote non violence at every opportunity, but cannot endorse narrow politics that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in [the face of] ethnic cleansing.” The realization of true “justice requires … a free Palestine from the River to the Sea,” he added, in a statement meaning that all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — precisely the territory that constitutes Israel — should henceforth be “Palestine.”
The day after Hill had made the foregoing remarks at the United Nations, CNN announced that it was parting ways with Hill, and that the latter was no longer under contract with the network. According to a Boston Herald report, “The network did not give a reason, but the move comes amid objections to Hill’s speech by the Anti-Defamation League and other groups.”
In December 2018, Hill was asked whether he would be willing to renounce Louis Farrakhan because of the latter’s repeated anti-Semitic rhetoric. In the course of his reply, Hill said: “Minister Farrakhan is my brother. The idea that we have to renounce him, denounce him, throw him away … in the black tradition, I ain’t got the luxury of throwing people who love us away. I ain’t got the luxury of taking people who come out of traditions that have saved us and cleaned us and throw them away. We can’t do that. We shouldn’t do that.”
In February 2021, Hill praised the Marxist Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement for wanting to “dismantle the Zionist project.” “We can’t dismantle white supremacy or imperialism section by section,” he said in a video for the Democratic Socialists of America. “These systems don’t have passports or visas. They don’t stop at the border. They’re international or transnational movements, and so there’s no way to stop a settler-colonial movement in Palestine and not be mindful of its relationship to a settler-colonial project in New Zealand or Australia or the United States.” Hill then proceeded to note that some Israeli police had been trained in America, while some American police had been trained in Israel — and in both cases they had learned “how to be repressive [and] violent [and how to] kill black people.” This reality, he reasoned, “speaks to a global system that we have to dismantle” — much as “Black Lives Matter, very explicitly, is talking about the dismantling of the Zionist project” and “very explicitly embracing BDS on those grounds.”
On May 6, 2021, Hill had a contentious exchange about critical race theory with black conservative Vernon Jones. After Jones said that Hill was “just as dumb as two left shoes,” an agitated Hill took exception to the name-calling and said: “We’re not gonna name-call on this show…. I have not called you a name. I’ve not called you an Uncle Tom. I’ve not called you a handkerchief-head. I’ve not called you a Sambo. I’ve not called you a shine. I’ve not called you a ham bone. I’ve not done any of that. So you’re not going to come on my show and call me dumb.”
Shortly after learning of the April 10, 2024 death of former football star O.J. Simpson, who in October 1995 had been acquitted of the June 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Hill used his X (Twitter) account to draw attention to what he viewed as widespread “racism” in America’s legal system. Wrote Hill on April 11, 2024: “O.J. Simpson was an abusive liar who abandoned his community long before he killed two people in cold blood. His acquittal for murder was the correct and necessary result of a racist criminal legal system. But he’s still a monster, not a martyr.”
In April 2024 as well, Hill spoke out in support of the many pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrators who, to protest Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip, were holding rallies and setting up encampments on college campuses across the United States. Said Hill: “To me, at the end of the day, no problem, no problem at all with disruption. Again, you don’t have to tear up the whole university. But making the university uncomfortable is exactly what you’re supposed to do. And I’m a parent of a college student. [And] I’m okay with it. Get your grades done, but tear some shit up, too.”
Marc Lamont Hill: Symbol of Leftist Hate
By John Perazzo
December 3, 2018
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