Did slavery and pregnancy drive professor to accost teen?

August 16, 2014

Supporters of a University of California Santa Barbara associate professor of feminist studies contend her pregnancy and a legacy of slavery drove her to accost a teen and steal the young woman’s protest sign. [FOX]

On March 4, members of an anti-abortion group were passing out pamphlets and holding signs with graphic images of dead fetuses on the university campus. Professor Mireille Miller-Young, 38, began yelling for the signs to be removed, grabbed one of the signs, and then pushed and scratched a 16-year-old activist.

“I may be a thief, but you’re a terrorist,” Miller-Young said as she walked away.

Miller-Young pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of theft, vandalism and battery. She was set to be sentenced on Thursday, but the date was extended.

Some supporters of Miller-Young said the “cultural legacy of slavery” and even the effects of pregnancy helped explain her actions.

“If she appears smiling on camera, she is ‘wearing the mask,’ that is, she is hiding her actual state through a strategy of self-presentation that is a cultural legacy of slavery,” said Eileen Boris, Feminist Studies professor.

Miller-Young, who was three months pregnant at the time of the March protest, wrote a letter of apology for her defense attorney to present before sentencing.

“The Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust group had a perfect right to come to UC Santa Barbara to express their views about women’s reproductive rights,” Miller-Young wrote. “As much as the images they displayed were offensive and distressing to my students, and to me, I had no right to take their poster or destroy it.”