School's out… forever!
The socialist who has Zohran Mamdani's endorsement to oust Rep. Adriano Espaillat in a New York City Democratic congressional primary co-created a bizarre, DEI-crazed college course that advocated for abolishing schools, which it accused of fueling "genocide," "white supremacy," and "settler colonialism," among other ills.
In the course materials, the candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is vying with Espaillat to represent New York's 13th Congressional District, also claims that American expansion, mobility, and citizenship "could not be divorced from the violence of dispossession, enslavement, and genocide" and that the right to movement and citizenship "could only maintain legitimacy by denying human dignity to Black and Indigenous people."
Chevalier, an Ivy League graduate and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and her fellow scholars taught the class, "Black Diasporic Visions: (De) Constructing Modes of Power," at the City University of New York, a public institution, in the spring of 2022.
Chevalier is a doctoral student in CUNY's Department of Sociology and has, like most graduate students, taught undergraduates at her place of study, where she was paid with taxpayer dollars, her financial disclosures show.
The syllabus for her "Black Diasporic Visions" class reads like a satire of extreme-left academia. "In this course," a description of the courts reads, "we consider these constructions which are often despite, within and at the intersections of institutions and systems that impact education, the prison industrial complex, food justice, public planning, preservation, legal personhood and climate change."
An 11-page syllabus for the course, which remains online, reveals that in addition to being a coauthor of the document, Chevalier also presented on several topics.
In a Week 13 segment, titled "RESISTANCE," Chevalier was a "discussant" for the research paper "Are We Ready for 'School' Abolition?: Thoughts and Practices of Radical Imaginary in Education."
The paper, by the Marxist-influenced University of Illinois Chicago professor David Stovall, calls for abolishing traditional schooling altogether and argues that schools are "parallel to prisons," are "part and parcel of the larger projects of settler colonialism and white supremacy/racism," and help to "justify the genocidal practices of the nation-state."
"'School' in its current form seeks to impose the assumed beliefs and cultural values of White, Western European, protestant, heterosexual, able-bodied cis-gendered males as the normative standard," the text argues.
On social media, Chevalier also made clear that she felt protesting and activism are a far more valuable use of student time than school.
It "is a lot more work than anything they've ever done in a single day in the American public school system," she said in a now-deleted X post from January 2022.
Another assigned reading for Chevalier's class, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists, asserts that the United States "was established as a settler colonial state and—like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel—it remains one today."
In other course material, Chevalier herself wrote that her views were "grounded in the abolition of policing and surveillance as practices" and spoke about her support for "a world without borders."
"The moral necessity of a world that values and protects our freedom of movement rests in the notion that there is justice in allowing ourselves and one another to find refuge and seek new experiences, to have the autonomy to make decisions about where and how to live, and to maintain the sanctity of the homes we choose to leave, remain in, or return to," Chevalier wrote.
A "resources" section for the course links to myriad woke psychobabble, including "abolition science," described as "an abolitionist project that envisions a science and math delinked from racial capitalism, imperialism, and oppression—a science and math that serves all people."
Another resource, the "Inner Hoe Uprising Podcast," offers "different episode sectors that unpack problematic childhood songs, 'animals do be gay'; a sector where hosts discuss queerness and gender in other animal species, and current political/social issues that impact reproductive health, Black women, nonbinary, gender variant and queer folks."
In addition to the time she spent on her "Black Diasporic Vision" class, Chevalier was also an instructor for an advanced undergraduate sociology class at CUNY's Lehman College. In the fall of 2020, Chevalier assigned a number of woke works, including Karl Marx's 1844 essay "Estranged Labor," which explicitly calls for the abolition of private property.
"The emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers," Marx declared in the text.
Chevalier's class also assigned students books on prison abolition, "penis panics," and a study examining the dynamics of anonymous gay sex in public bathrooms, her course syllabus shows.
"I don't know what a world without prisons will look like but it will fundamentally transform our relationship with other people," reads a cartoon attached as a reading on the syllabus.
Chevalier's class was a required course for all sociology majors in Lehman, a public college in the Bronx, records show.
Chevalier is one of three Mamdani-backed Democratic Socialists challenging Democratic incumbents in New York City congressional primaries this year. Mamdani backed Chevalier late in the campaign—breaking a reported handshake promise to Espaillat that the mayor would either endorse him or stay neutral. Espaillat has represented the 13th district, which covers Harlem, Washington Heights, and a swath of the Bronx, since 2017.
The heavily Hispanic district also has a large Modern Orthodox Jewish community and includes Yeshiva University, and Espaillat is a strong supporter of Israel, a position that puts him at odds with Mamdani. Chevalier, by contrast, shares Mamdani's antipathy for Israel and notoriously attended a pro-Hamas Oct. 8, 2023, rally in Times Square, wearing a keffiyeh. In old tweets, she has also condemned interracial relationships and said she used the American flag as a washrag. She has blasted American military veterans as "child murderers" guilty of "war crimes."
