First-year UCLA medical students were forced to sit through a bizarre lecture by a pro-Hamas activist who made them pray to ‘mama Earth’ while a faculty member sought to identify one student who refused to participate.
Lisa Gray-Garcia gave the two-hour presentation at Geffen Hall, on the university’s downtown campus on March 27.
The lecture was a mandatory part of the Structural Racism and Health Equity class that all future doctors must take, administered by pediatrician Lindsay Wells.
Gray-Garcia calls herself a ‘poverty skola’, keeps her face covered with a keffiyeh except in a few interviews, and called Hamas’ October 7 attack ‘justified’.
Students were instructed to touch the floor with their fists while she made a ‘non-secular’ prayer to ‘mama Earth’ and our ‘ancestors’, a complaint stated.
‘Mama earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played,’ Gray-Garcia said during the prayer, part of which was recorded by a student and given to the Washington Free Beacon.
Lisa Gray-Garcia gave the two-hour presentation at Geffen Hall, on the UCLA downtown Los Angeles Campus on March 27
Footage of the lecture, in which Gray-Garcia kept her face covered
She claimed private property was a ‘crapitalist lie’ that killed ‘black, brown, and houseless’ people who were forced to live on the streets.
Gray-Garcia, who grew up homeless with her single mother from the age of 11, railed against anti-homeless campaigns during another part of the lecture she post online.
‘Not only are our bodies considered unclean in public, not only are out lives criminalized for being outside without access to a roof, but politricksters use us for their campaigns,’ she said.
‘$30 million was spent on removal of our houseless bodies… for turning human being into trash.
She asked the students to think of how many homes could be built with that money ‘even in these inflated, ridiculous prices of the commodified Mama Earth’.
Gray-Garcia’s lecture was titled ‘Housing (In)justice in LA: Addressing Unhousing and Practicing Solidarity’ but also veered into the crisis in Gaza.
At one point, she led students in chanting ‘Free, Free Palestine’, as UCLA faculty including Dr Wells watched in silence.
During a second call for students to kneel on the floor, one refused to do so. An unidentified UCLA faculty member is said to have enquired as to the student’s name, sparking fears they could face repercussions for refusing to comply.
The lecture was a mandatory part of the Structural Racism and Health Equity class that all future doctors must take, administered by pediatrician Lindsay Wells (pictured)
Gray-Garcia at an ‘activists in residence’ event at UCLA earlier this year
It is unclear how much Gray-Garcia was paid for the lecture. UCLA charges medical students fees of around $44,000-a-year, with additional costs taking the total needed to train there to $84,000-a-year.
Gray-Garcia slammed Israel just hours after Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 7 expressed support for Palestine, but none for the murdered Israelis.
‘As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine & all of MamaEarth in prayer & love we need to make the connections,’ she wrote on Twitter.
‘For us Houseless, indigenous, swept/evicted people -we r not separate from this struggle – we suffer from the same settler colonial terror.’
Then, on November 1, she wrote: ‘When u resist after decades of relentless poLicing, killing& terrorizing that’s not ‘terrorism’ that’s justice.’
Gray-Garcia has also previously called Israel ‘amerikkklan’, in reference to the KKK.
Later in the lecture, she called modern medicine ‘white science’ and referred to North America as occupied ‘Turtle Island’ and said they were in ‘what the settlers call LA’.
She frequently calls cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco by their Native American names and calls them ‘occupied’.
Gray-Garcia (left) at a pro-Palestine event wearing the face covering she is frequently seen sporting while in public
Gray-Garcia slammed Israel just hours after Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 7 expressed support for Palestine, but none for the murdered Israelis
Gray-Garcia slammed Israel just hours after Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 7 expressed support for Palestine, but none for the murdered Israelis
Then, on November 1, she wrote: ‘When u resist after decades of relentless poLicing, killing& terrorizing that’s not ‘terrorism’ that’s justice’.
Towards the end of the lecture, Gray-Garcia told students to stand for a second prayer, which all but a few did.
‘Of those gathered, a handful of students who were visibly uncomfortable declined to participate, remaining seated throughout,’ UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group wrote in a complaint
‘At this point, a UCLA staff member inquired as to the identity of a medical student who had remained sitting down, potentially singling them out for disciplinary treatment.
‘The net effect was that UCLA staff intimidated first-year medical students into participating in a religious service in derogation of their own personal beliefs.’
Gray-Garcia posted about the lecture on her social media platforms, saying she was sharing ‘the myth of “clean”, the brutality of criminalization and the medicine of homefulness’.
‘Sharing violence of sweeps removal, erasure, disabled dumping, HELLthcare and urgent medicine of poor peoples solutions to poverty,’ she added.
‘Infiltrate to liberate. This knowledge, us skolaz shud b invited into every medical & law/social work, psychology & education dept to name a few, across occupied Turtle Island.’
She thanked ‘all the warrior infiltrator conscious students for inviting us in’.
Gray-Garcia in another post shared a photo of a security guard at UCLA she claimed accosted her after she arrived.
‘In the multibillion dollar palace called medical Skool – was 5 minutes early and made mistake of using bathroom – guess who was called,’ she wrote.
DailyMail.com contacted to UCLA for comment about the lecture.
Gray-Garcia posted about the lecture on her social media platforms, saying she was sharing ‘the myth of ‘clean’, the brutality of criminalization and the medicine of homefulness’
Gray-Garcia in another post shared a photo of a security guard at UCLA she claimed accosted her after she arrived
Gray-Garcia draws frequent parallels between homeless people and Palestinians, whom she considered to both be oppressed.
‘Today hundreds more babies, mamas and disabled elders are being murdered so greedy, homicidal settler terrorists can steal all of occupied Palestine,’ she claimed on December 5.
‘In occupied Huchiun (Oakland) two more settler lies (laws) are being implemented so settler poltricksters and hater wealth hoarding neighbors can push all already evicted poor Houseless peoples out of Huchiun.
‘In Berkeley, houseless peoples are being evicted from their RVs and tents cuz HypoKrazy Berkeley doesn’t want to see them in their settler stolen streets.’
Gray-Garcia has a habit of changing the spelling of words to mock groups or make a political point, especially comparing them to white supremacists such as with ‘akkkademia’.
The activist’s work draws heavily on her experience of homelessness growing up living in a car with her indigenous, disabled mother Dee from age 11.
‘I had to drop out of formal institutions of learning. I enrolled full-time in the skoo of hard knocks to survive, where my Xingona warrior, indigenous, disabled, poverty skola Mama Dee was my writing teacher,’ she wrote on her website.
‘Mama was a “G” and not user-friendly or easy on me, but she was insistent that the AristoKrazy didn’t own writing, history, art, poetry, theory and storytelling.
‘It was extremely important for poor and houseless, “uneducated” people like us to take that lie back and write powerful poetry and prose about our struggles and our lives.’
Gray-Garcia (right) at another lecture she gave on a simialr subject
The activist’s work draws heavily on her experience of homelessness growing up living in a car with her indigenous, disabled mother Dee from age 11. She later founded ‘Poor Magazine’ to write about the experience of poverty
Gray-Garcia explained wrote about the experience in her book Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.
‘As Dee, a single mother, struggles with the demons of her own childhood of neglect and abuse, Lisa has to quickly assume the role of an adult in an attempt to keep some stability in their lives,’ the blurb reads.
‘Dee and Tiny ultimately become underground celebrities in San Francisco, squatting in storefronts and performing the “art of homelessness”.’
Mother and daughter first lived rough in Venice Beach before relocating to San Francisco in their broken-down station wagon.
She claimed to have been given so many citations for infractions related to being homeless than she was sentenced to 2,700 of community service.
As she was selling t-shirts every day in the street to afford to buy food, she wouldn’t have been able to do it – until a lawyer came to her rescue.
She later founded ‘Poor Magazine’ to write about the experience of poverty, and since 2011 runs The Homefulness Project.
The project includes communal housing, a garden, and sliding-scale café.
Property records indicate she is one of three owners of a 10-bedroom, six bathroom house on Macarthur Boulevard in Oakland with 20 people registered as living there.
The house was bought for $79,000 in 2011, and is now worth more than $1 million, according to industry estimates.