Columbia University's Center for the Study of Social Difference has scheduled a November 18 event called "We Charge Genocide at 75." It's part of a lecture series the university titled "Counter-narratives at 250" — the 250 being America's birthday, and the counter-narrative being that the birthday boy is a mass murderer.
The assigned reading list includes William L. Patterson's We Charge Genocide and Nick Estes' Our History Is the Future. No word on whether there's a cake.
The event description refers to the United States as a "settler-colonial state" and frames American history as an "imperial settler colonial project." This isn't a fringe pamphlet handed out at a bus stop. This is an Ivy League university hosting an official academic series built around the premise that the country's founding is a crime scene.
The "Counter-narratives at 250" series has been running for months. In October, the same center hosted "Open Veins Of Latin America at 55," another installment in what appears to be a semester-long project to reframe every American milestone as evidence of atrocity. The reading list for the November event also includes Malcolm X's The Last Speeches and references the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn — referred to by the organizers as the Battle of Greasy Grass — as part of the historical framework.
Seth Segal, a Turning Point USA Alumni Association member and founder of TPUSA Young Professionals of New York, flagged the event in a report for The Gateway Pundit. The details he surfaced are worth noting not because they're surprising — Columbia has been running this playbook for years — but because the timing is so perfectly on the nose.
America turns 250. Columbia's contribution to the celebration is an academic series whose entire structure assumes the country was built on genocide. Not "explores whether" or "examines the debate around." The series title is "Counter-narratives at 250." The event title is "We Charge Genocide." There's no ambiguity about the thesis.
Columbia has not issued a public statement about the event or the series. No university official has been quoted defending or distancing from the programming. The Center for the Study of Social Difference lists the event on its calendar the way you'd list a bake sale — routine departmental business.
That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a controversy at Columbia. It's a Tuesday. An entire academic center exists to produce events like this, funded by tuition checks and — in many cases — federal research dollars. Parents write six-figure checks so their kids can attend a university that treats the country's founding as an indictment.
The 250th anniversary of the United States is July 4, 2026. Columbia scheduled a genocide panel for November. The assigned reading is a petition that accused the U.S. government of genocide against Black Americans, submitted to the United Nations in 1951 by William L. Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress.
Seventy-five years later, that petition is a Columbia University curriculum item. Patterson submitted it as an act of protest. Columbia is teaching it as settled scholarship.
