Editorial: Heated claims undermine USAC elections
By Daily Bruin
May 5, 2010 9:49 p.m.
Early Wednesday, all the Students First! signboards, both Defend Affirmative Action Party signboards and two Bruins United signboards, as well as dozens of other signs were either destroyed or removed in an act of senseless vandalism.
While this board condemns the vandalism, for which the motives are unclear at this point, we are more deeply troubled by the reaction ““ a disgusting display of partisanship and divisiveness from current and aspiring student leaders.
Undergraduate Students Association Council Internal Vice President Shahida Bawa published a Facebook note signed by Students First!, which made two incredible assumptions: First, that Bruins United benefitted from the act in their attempt to level the playing field, and second, that the attacks were motivated by bigotry. Furthermore, the note self-proclaims Students First! as the representative slate of minority issues on campus, casting the act as a general attack on underrepresented students.
These accusations are nothing less than appalling, especially from the person responsible for holding diversity dialogues and representing more than 800 student groups. While we realize that Bawa is the author, the rest of the slate has not rejected her statements, which is an implicit endorsement of her views.
The IVP has little basis to accuse the vandals of racism. What she fails to realize is that a perceived attack on Students First! by no means constitutes an attack on all minorities. This conflation indicates a disturbing egocentrism in our student leadership, and reveals how tightly minority identification is entwined with slate politics.
What began as vandalism has now snowballed into a highly divisive conflict. USAC is meant to unify, but fails to do so. Campus politics are defined by a knee-jerk identification process based largely on minority classification.
Bawa’s comments indicate that slates encourage this divisive minority identification. Race becomes a large part of how students relate to slates, and when it enters a dialogue, salient issues are crowded out. This diminishes the validity of the election process and affects all undergraduates.
At this point, it doesn’t even matter who wins. What’s more important is that we reject the accusations of our representatives as immature, reductive and false. Some USAC members are attempting to unnecessarily inject race and minority issues into the election process, but we need not participate. We can turn our backs to this pathetic display, secure in the knowledge that as students of this university, we have far more in common than we do not. We are every race, creed, sexual-orientation and more. We are, above all, UCLA students, and we do not approve.
