# The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at Uc Berkeley - Hardcover

by **Tony Platt** (Author)

**The incendiary story of conquest, racism, warfare, and historical amnesia at one of the world's most celebrated and ostensibly enlightened public universities.**

"_This_ is a land acknowledgment." --**Ruth Wilson Gilmore**, author of _Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation_

"_The Scandal of Cal_ is a template for scrutinizing other land-grant universities ... This is a beautifully written and heartbreaking narrative." --**Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz**, author of _An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States_

The University of California, Berkeley--widely known as "Cal"--is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university's roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in _The Scandal of Cal_, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley's history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university's desecration of graves and large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains. He tracks its role in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics in the early twentieth century. He sheds light on the school's complicity with the military-industrial complex and its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project. And he underscores its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings, which echo in the institution's decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cal's culpability in some of the cruelest chapters of US history and sounds a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the impact of higher education in the United States and beyond.

### Author Biography

**Tony Platt** is the author of more than ten books on race, inequality, and social justice in American history, among them _Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency,_ and _Grave Matters: The Controversy over Excavating California's Buried Indigenous Past._ Platt, now a professor emeritus, taught at the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and CSU Sacramento, where he received awards for teaching and scholarship. Platt has written for the _Los Angeles Times,_ the _San Francisco Chronicle, History News Network, Monthly Review,_ and the _Guardian,_ and his commentaries have aired on NPR. His publications have been translated into four languages. Platt lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California.

**Number of Pages:** 320

**Dimensions:** 1.1 x 9 x 5.9 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** August 29, 2023

## Details

- **Price:** 30.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 30.00 USD | In stock |

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- The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at Uc Berkeley - Hardcover

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