Robert B. Sklaroff, M.D., F.A.C.P.

Medical Oncology/Hematology  Telephone: (215) 333-4900

 Facsimile: (215) 333-2023
Smylie Times Building - Suite #500-C
8001 Roosevelt Boulevard  rsklaroff@gmail.com
Philadelphia, PA 19152
February 11, 2019

To: Patrick J. O’Connor, Esq., Chair, Temple University Board of Trustees – Plus Trustees
Re: Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D. [D.O.B. 12/17/1978]
Cc: internet

Illustrating again the unambiguous pattern of violence-promotion fomented in multiple lectures —

reflecting moral turpitude — are the following excerpts from a speech delivered @ Rutgers on 3/6/2017
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxpO8mR4cw]. Minute-markers can be provided “prn.” Note that
a transcript does not capture his delivery methodology, nor does it portray the “Ebonics” employed;
neither the visual nor the audio disrupts the “intersectionality” messaging unambiguously conveyed. Also,
again violating University policy, he is introduced as a Professor at Temple University and never disclaims
his representation thereof; he teaches this stream-of-consciousness to the (inter-)national community,
including disrespect for law-and-order (by opposing police and prisons), promotion of radicalism, claiming
there is an African Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, demanding change, shutting-down the University,
resisting, taking stuff, claiming Israeli police plant weapons upon Palestinian Youth, telling allegedly
oppressed people that they should not merely be peaceful, and claiming American Racism is raging.

Racism … is America’s original sin. Not just racism … white supremacy.

There is a kind of irony in the unfettered mediocrity that pervades his [Trump’s] administration.

metal detectors [don’t] make students feel more safe. It makes them feel less safe. When you walk into
a place where you need to be checked for guns, that don’t make nobody feel safer

prayer rooms must accommodate Muslim students. When you have parent-teacher night at a high
school, or you have classes when people are going to jum’ah [Muslim early afternoon prayers on Friday,
which can take 45 to 90 minutes], there’s a particular hidden curriculum that tells us what matters.

If … a first-generation Latina … can’t find no faculty in my department who look like me, that makes me
question if you love me, institutionally. When I walk into the cafeteria, what kind of food we got, tabasco
sauce or hot sauce? There’s a difference. When I walk into the STEM fields, and all the faculty are
straight/CIS white men, maybe that sends a message that I don’t belong here. Do you love me?

Don’t just give me black studies, or African American studies. Make it a commitment. I’m tired of walking
into black studies classes and all I see is black people. Cause I don’t see a whole lot of white studies classes.
… We all benefit from black studies, queer studies, disability studies. Let’s engage and force the university
to engage. the whole community must come to the table. We must do something different.

1
The entire institution [universities] … becomes like settler colonialists rather than neighborhood partners.
… Stop waiting for them to give you stuff. The time now is to take stuff. Of sort, yes reparations. What
does reparations mean? It means to repair the damage done. So how do we repair the damage
done? We ask for investment. We ask for representation and inclusion. And then they say no. And then
we demand those very things.

How do you all do that, in this moment? First thing you gotta do is organize. Students and faculty, and
staff. We have to put together, or partner with organizations that will demand their interests will be met
…. I need you all to join organizations. And connect across difference. We need intersectionality in our
organizing. Don’t be telling me you’re worried about saving the black student, if you’re not worried about
rape culture. . . . We gotta organize with everybody who is marginalized, not just at Rutgers, but around
the globe. . . . We must organize intersectionally. . . .

And we have to resist, because organizing without resistance is pointless. What does resistance look
like, in a university context? universities don’t have feelings. They have interests. So your job, as you
resist, is to force the universities’ interests to converge with yours. Make the university
uncomfortable. Universities don’t like to be uncomfortable. They love to trumpet out victories. They
love to show you on the website. They don’t love disruption. Nobody loves disruption. So when y’all
suddenly on twitter “Black at Harvard,” when you’re at Old Miss’ protesting, suddenly the conversation
changes when the world is watching. It’s kind of like, Y’all grew up in the ‘hood – People from Newark
know what I’m talking about – you got roaches, you got mice right. When you turn the lights out, they do
whatever they want to do. They sit on your crib. They open the refrigerator door. They DVR TV
shows. They do whatever they want to do. But once you flick the light on, they scatter.

Putting a spotlight on it is whatcha have to do and now the spotlight is just the entry point. The march or
the sit-in or the occupation of an office is just the starting point. That’s the spotlight to the problem. That
dramatizes the situation. But you gotta be willing to do that. The situation in Mizoo didn’t change
because the university got religion; it felt bad about white supremacy on campus. It was when the football
team was willing to walk off the field, and said we’re willing to lose our scholarships, and compromise a
million dollars a week. Then the university said, Wait a minute, we can have unhappy Negroes, but we
can’t lose a million dollars a week. We got to do something. Y’all gotta make them uncomfortable.

Universities love to give people protest areas ‘we love free speech, we have a whole area designated
for it.’ The last place you should go, is where they tell y’all to go. If they tell you to protest over here,
you oughta be over there. If they tell you to be outside, you need to be inside. If they say protest in the
square, you go to their office, and don’t leave. If we don’t get it [what we want], shut it down. That’s
how you protest. You’ve gotta be willing to resist. But you gotta be willing to pay a price. Everyone
wanta go to heaven, but nobody want to die. …There’s a price to be paid for struggle. There’s a price
to be paid for sacrifice.

Academics tend to be great liberal white folk. They love black people. Until it’s time to hire one. And
then suddenly, nobody’s quite qualified.

Stop waiting for consensus. Consensus ain’t never been the starting point for struggle. Malcolm [X]
… Bayard [Rustin] … Fanny Lou [Hamer] … Ella [Jo Baker] … Angela [Davis] … Asata [Shakur] ain’t have
consensus. … there aren’t many of us. Less is more, nigga. There’re plenty of us. Thank you. G-d bless
you. Free all political prisoners. I’m a prison abolitionist. I don’t believe there should be prisons.

2
Mainstream journalism doesn’t allow for nuance....[Cable TV] Bookers book who they always book….They
don’t call me for Middle East politics even though that’s an area I have expertise about…. Everything is
driven by how much money we can make….Everything is always breaking; there’s a race to be first, rather
than a race to be right….digital technology allows everyday citizens to play a bigger role in media making

We can get support from Gazan children on how to make makeshift gas masks or how to clean our eyes
out when we’re getting tear-gassed on the ground from state-sponsored violence.

I don’t expect them to ever stop calling me crazy, or a radical. Because I am a radical. I’m very proud
of that title and I don’t run from it. I’m more interested in how radical politics can become normalized.

I support divestment in general from unhealthy, unjust institutions in Israel. I support the BDS movement
.… I believe that boycotting, divestment and sanctions are one of the most civil and peaceful methods of
resistance. It’s not the only method, but it is an ideal method of resisting occupation of Palestine. we
look back to the apartheid movement. And we look to the fact that universities again were heavily
resistant to divest in the 90s, and in the 80s. And we had to protest. We had to march. We had to
fight. Because they normalized the regime. … One of the arguments people make when we say BDS
movement is “Oh my G-d, but what about all the interesting stuff happening in Israeli universities?” Same
argument was made about South Africa, right? If you boycott South African universities, what about
intellectual exchange, what about all these great ideas that are being produced? So there’s a way that
we try to normalize oppression, and deodorize oppression. The BDS movement across the board offers
concrete solutions and they offer a method for redress for everyday people, as well as institutions.

we want to … take the profit out of mass incarceration. … we have to decarcerate [sic] our imagination. .
. .. We could decriminalize gambling … prostitution … things that are dictated by a sort of Victorian
prudishness. … I am unconvinced that there is anybody who is a serial killer or a child molester or a rapist
who does not have mental health issues. … the answer is not to put them in a cage for 20 years, and they
still come out a rapist. They still come out a child molester. Rather, to put them in secured medical
confinement, so that they can get medical treatment for this. . . .

Some contexts I do think call for other forms of resistance that aren’t so respectable. I don’t believe in
nonviolence, for example, as a philosophy. I believe in it as a tactic, a strategy. But I wouldn’t tell an
occupied people, for example, that they should just be peaceful. I wouldn’t tell people who are being
shot at not to shoot back. That’s just not in my constitution, my moral constitution. So I think that
there’s a variety of strategies that we can use. . . I don’t want to sell you a dream that you can have this
nice, smooth, warm and fuzzy interaction all the time and still get the change you want. Revolutions
are not peaceful. Revolutions are not neat. Revolutions are messy and they do come at a price. And
we have to either be willing to pay it, or if we’re scared, say we’re scared, and not.

I don’t believe in community policing. I believe in communities without police. . . . That’s the end goal. I
was part of the organizing around Ferguson and Palestine. I made that Dream Defender trip, with
Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, Hands Up United, Black Youth Project, and a few others.

many of us were committed to radical politics, we weren’t just looking to a [Martin Luther] King, we
were also looking to a Malcolm [X]. Malcolm [X] had talked about the black political imaginary, about the
need to support Yasser Arafat, because we had seen a strong commitment from Black Panthers.

3
James Baldwin wrote passionately about the 6-Day War and about ’48. But after the Six-Day War, he
began to think through essays he wrote in ’83 and in ’81. we were out of that intellectual tradition, so it
was easier for us to see the connection.

Black Palestinians, Afro-Palestinians were another connection. In East Jerusalem, if you go to the
African Quarter, there are entire sections of Afro-Palestinians. we saw ourselves in the tradition. as folk
who are wrestling with issues of state violence, there are very direct connections. Palestinian girls talk
about resistance to state violence. we see just the awful atrocities that came, when settlers came
in. people made connections between urban gentrification and settler colonialism.

Palestinian children, both citizens of the Israeli state and those from the territories, were framed by
police and were killed by police, and then police were planting weapons in their hands. Or
incarcerated. We talked mass incarceration and the differential sentencing between Palestinian citizens
and Israeli citizens. One goes to a military court; one goes to a judge. One has to be seen in two days;
one has to be seen in 5 days. these kind of differences we can relate to. It’s our own kind of apartheid,
our own kind of Jim Crow. we saw connections and solidarity and reciprocity. Palestinians were writing
back to us. people in the West Bank told us how to respond to military occupation. in the Old City, in
Jerusalem, I watched stop and frisk, all day, on Via Dolorosa. … watch Palestinian children being stopped
to be searched. For no other reasons than they’re Palestinian children. They’re being criminalized
because they’re outside.

we shouldn’t need to see black people there to know that occupation … state violence [and] ethnic
cleansing is bad. We should be able to resist it because it’s wrong. So we should be outraged just on
general principle. I don’t care where it is. We should be willing to speak back and resist.

that comes with political education. we have to be able to see the interconnectedness of all of us. We
have to see a kind of resistance struggle, not just to a particular military regime, or a particular political
regime, but to white supremacy, to colonialism. in a resistance to hate capitalism. If we understand
those structures, then we understand how all of it connects. We understand the connection between
being occupied in Palestine, and being gentrified in Brooklyn…. there is a huge difference between
being stateless, as you are if you’re in one of the two of three territories in Palestine, than being in
Brooklyn, in Fort Greene, where I live. Even if I’m gentrified in Brooklyn, that’s not the same, you know
what I’m saying, as being in East Jerusalem.

with Syria, we have to frame it as a human rights violation, as a human rights crisis. We have to frame it
as another form of ethnic cleansing. But we also have to have kind of a political end goal in mind.

It also needs to be reciprocal. Because when I’m on the line for Black Lives Matter, I often don’t see
enough Palestinians. we need the reciprocity. There’s not enough solidarity. And if there is solidarity,
it’s rhetorical. So, we stand in solidarity, but we won’t stand outside. You know what I’m saying. That’s
what I need by reciprocity.

we have to understand our complicity in this. The same thing we do with the Israel question. We pay
tax money. We help fund an occupation. We need to frame it in that way, so that people understand
that they’re responsible, to some extent. And then we need an angle.

We need solidarity between blacks and Arabs. All folk of color, we need solidarity. White folk, we need
you all there. We need all folk. We need justice. And Syria needs justice.

4
5