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The Palestine Writes Literature Festival has come and gone — did anyone notice? — at the University of Pennsylvania. Among the speakers there was the obsessive antisemite Roger Waters, who for once did not come wearing his SS uniform, the “Death-To-Israel” harridan Aya Ghanameh, and the mountebank Marc Lamont Hill, who in 2018 at the UN, during its International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, spoke on behalf of “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” That last remark — in essence calling for Israel to disappear — cost him his gig at CNN. But you can’t keep a good man down. He’s still all over the place. Here’s his full description of himself; modesty is not his strong suit:
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.
He is currently the host of BET News, The Grio, Al Jazeera UpFront, and the Coffee & Books podcast. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Hill is a Presidential Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he teach courses in Anthropology, Urban Education, and Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to that, he held positions at Morehouse College, Temple University, and Columbia University.
Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He has worked on campaigns to end the death penalty, abolish prisons, and release numerous political prisoners. Dr. Hill has also worked in solidarity with human rights movements around the world. He is the founder and director of The People’s Education Center in Philadelphia, as well as the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books.”
Ebony Magazine has named him one of America’s 100 most influential Black leaders.
Dr. Hill is the author or co-author of eight books, including the award-winning Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life; Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on The Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility; Except For Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics; and Schooling Against The Prison.
Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. His current research and writing explore the relationships between race, culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East.
In this oozy swamp of braggadocio, pseudo-thought and gobbledygook, there is very little — one book out of the eight he claims to have written — about the Middle East. His current “research and writing explore the relationships between race, culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East,” so maybe, at long last, he really is swotting up the subject of what he calls, so very expansively, the “Middle East.” Do you think Marc Lamont Hill, one of the leading intellectual voices in the country, and also, let’s not forget, one of the 100 most influential black leaders in the country, has any idea about what the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine says, what it was intended to create, what territory it included? Do you think he’s familiar with the Treaty of San Remo (1922), or with Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, or with UN Security Council Resolution 242, and the authoritative gloss on that resolution by its main author, Lord Caradon? Do you think Marc Lamont Hill knows when the toponym “West Bank” was first invented, and why? Do you think he knows when the “Palestinian people” were invented, and why? Do you think he knows how long Jews have lived uninterruptedly in the Land of Israel? Or when the first Muslim Arab appeared in that land? Or why the Al-Aqsa Mosque was deliberately built on the very place where the First and Second Temples once stood?
Let’s look at his background for clues as to what entitles him to consider himself an expert on Israel and the Palestinians.
Here is the title of Marc Lamont Hill’s doctoral thesis:
(Re)negotiating knowledge, power, and identities in Hip -Hop Lit
And here is his Abstract of that thesis, a florilegium of gibberish:
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.
Yes, I know. Nonsense on stilts. Of course, let’s not forget his doctorate “with distinction.” He was given that doctorate for a dissertation on Hip-Hop Lit. Might it be that the UPenn professors wanted to part company with him as painlessly as possible, and to avoid any possibility of a lawsuit claiming “racism” if he wasn’t granted his degree “with distinction”?
More on this flim-flam man can be found here: “A brief history of Marc Lamont Hill’s “expertise” on the Middle East,” by Daled Amos, Elder of Ziyon, September 24, 2023:
Three years ago, Marc Lamont Hill was challenged on Twitter about whether he had the background necessary to talk knowledgeably about the Middle East…
In that Twitter exchange, Hill never names books that he has read that would qualify him to speak on Israel and the Middle East. When asked if he has read from a list of authors, he replies off-handedly “of course,” but when pinned down to name books, classes or degrees —
“o He replies he has read “exhaustively” (whatever that means), but doesn’t name any books or articles. There is no way to gauge whose work he has read or if his bothered to read different viewpoints.
o He points out that he has a “graduate degree,” but does not say what it is in. His Ph.D is in Hip-Hop Lit and he has a B.S. in Spanish and Education. According to Wikipedia, Hill has a Masters, but the source it links to makes no mention of it. Apparently, people are supposed to be impressed by degrees in subjects that have nothing to do with what he is talking about.
o Finally, Hill vaguely claims to have “many years scholarly experience/study on the subject,” and then resorts to claiming that this is more than the authors he was asked if he had read.When asked further on what qualifies him to speak on Israel and the Middle East, he claims to have been “trained” in the area and to have “read widely and deeply” in the area. But trained means more than reading a lot. It implies having a mentor and teacher who himself has some sort of expertise — someone who is directing the learning and perhaps even testing to measure comprehension….
The bottom line is there is no indication that Marc Lamont Hill has any particular qualification as an expert on the subject. He has no more expertise than the average tweeter.
For some reason, Presidential Professor Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D. has not put his doctoral dissertation on Hip-Hop Lit on-line, which is a pity, because a great many people, including me, would love to learn more about the subject. Perhaps he will reconsider. He must be proud of his dissertation, after all; he was awarded the Ph.D., he claims, “with distinction.” Remember what his website says: “Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.”
And if you want to hear Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D., speaking, and debating, with his wonted eloquence and passion, just click here, or here, or here.
I’ve come to appreciate Presidential Professor Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D. I hope you have, too.
What do professors of hip hop studies teach, how to rhyme words like, bitch, ho and Glock?
They teach hate, and not just for whitey, but Hill cloaks it in sociological / psychological gibberish and gives it an air of scholarship.
Basically, he’s a very clever fraud.
Sounds a lot Emperor Odumba, he had his advanced degree as an extortionist
A younger Cornell West.
I think colleges have grievance studies and rubbish like classes and majors I hip-hop just to fill their government-mandated requirement for people of color (read “black”) professors. They certainly can’t find enough qualified ones to teach real classes.
Not unlike Kendi or Coates.
There are people who have real doctorates in real subjects but who are unemployed because academia likes hiring frauds like Hill.
They are box`checkers and quota fillers. Nothing more.
The one thing I’ve always thought about the Obama’s, especially
Michelle, is how much these two millionaire grifters have used
the shtick “black oppressed victim” to attain power and riches.
Always presenting themselves as something they’re not – like
Marc Lamont Hill – to get what they want. And yet, imposing
dangerous ideologies to achieve their aims too. Just like Marc
Lamont Hill.
Hill comes across in the article as a conman but what is shocking
is to hear him in his own words in the ‘hear’ and ‘hear’ links
provided. Butter would melt in his lying mouth as – while claiming
that Jews must be protected – he calls for one “secular” country of
Palestinians and Jews. IOW the destruction of the Jewish state.
And I never heard a more stupid premise in my life than that
White European/Americans invented the “category’ of race. That
would mean no other people’s of the Earth ever saw themselves as
different or separate from another race, And so on, with many other
inanities, including Critical Race Theory.
Hill is a real smoothie, just like folksy B. Hussein – maybe not as shrewd
but definitely with woke and dangerous ideas.
Somewhere in Heaven, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Marian Anderson, Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong are vomiting their guts up.
First I ever heard of this grifter was on O’Reilly many years ago. Some grifts put a finger in the wind others create the wind. Not the kind of breeze that wafts down from the hill tops and rustles the leave but a window box fan set on high. A man made sense of nonsense. A jumble of mostly incoherent gibberish with a few big words and zero facts. Unfortunately they have an audience with benefits. This guy is on that list, sadly a long list of what ails our culture today.
You stole my thunder, cedar9, albeit much more eloquently. Same experience here. I remember asking myself internally, “What is this guy actually trying to say with this gibberish and, more importantly, who is his target audience and are they actually ignorant enough to buy what he’s selling?”
The answer to the latter goes without saying broadly, but the narrow focus on college kids makes it all make much more sense now, since most college kids can’t make change for a dollar or tell you where Washington is located. The ‘garbage in/garbage out’ effect from the institutions of “higher learning” makes an actual sheepskin more valuable than it’s diploma namesake and Hill is a poster boy for the reasons why.
A Ph.d in Hip-Hop Lit.? I admit that I haven’t listened to much hip hop music or literature (if there is such a thing), however what I have heard is expletive doggerel. I only have a Master’s in English Lit. so I’m not a well rounded intellectual like the esteemed Dr. Hill. Nonetheless, I suspect that if I was an oppressed minority I could have written a Ph.d dissertation on Amos ‘n’ Andy and relate how the show foreshadowed the complex relationship between the idiosyncratic tendencies of aged English musicians advocating for the Palestinians and the demonization of the Jews.
It speaks volumes about the U.S.’s profound cultural, intellectual and moral rot, that transparently malignant, dim-witted and self-serving charlatans such as Hill, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram “X” Kendi (to name only a few) are celebrated, enriched and shown deference by the vile and stupid Dumb-o-crats.
“leading intellectual ”
What comedy.
He is a fast talking jive jerk with an overgrown, gaseous ego who led a race for AA to get into college.
“Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.” This is untrue. Hill is far from being an intellectual for he has been on the wrong side of many issues. He is what Dr. Thomas Sowell calls one of “the anointed.” Sowell wrote about these elitists who believe they have a monopoly on morality in his 1995 book The Vision Of The Anointed. Sowell defines The Anointed class as those “who have the hubris to believe it is their role, with their superior vision and ideas, to rescue the victims of society’s oppression by imposing their collective will onto others” by using the power of the state to enforce that hubris.
Hill used to serve as a go to lib on Fox back in the day of Barack Hussein Obama, and was considered the erudite voice of that upwardly mobile communist class. His lack of knowledge was displayed in his ability to spew racism in such a fast-talking pace (what they teach in Hip Hop U) that he eventually displayed all he knew and wasn’t invited back. Personally, at every opportunity I would email the host and complain about his anti-Americanism and trust that others did as well. Glad he has experience with CNN, that is truly who should re-hire him to vault him to his place in obscurity.