UCLA community should respond to viral offensive YouTube clip with civility

By The Asian Pacific Coalition at UCLA

On Sunday, an alarming video was re-posted on YouTube from the Facebook account of a UCLA student, Alexandra Wallace. The video, titled “Asians in the Library,” chronicled the student’s racist tirade against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities at UCLA. The resulting reaction reveals an alarmingly dangerous campus climate and an underlying current of racism and prejudice still vibrantly alive in America.

Her decision to state such culturally insensitive remarks via a forum as public as a Facebook video is disturbing. What gives her the audacity to record such a video? Perhaps she did not expect anyone to react. Perhaps she did not expect APIs to fend for themselves.

Well think again. We are responding, and by the numbers.

As evidenced by the responses of outrage and hurt from our community, it is clear that this student’s comments can be considered a hate speech, an act of discrimination, harassment and profiling.

However, we must address the many ignorant comments stemming from our own community in reaction to Wallace’s comments. While we condemn this student’s remarks as not only ignorant and offensive but hateful as well, we believe that we as a community can do better than to resort to the student’s tactics of throwing out divisive words, which only perpetuate a culture of racism and sexism on both sides.

We will not use our strength as a community to attack this individual but rather we will use this event to grasp at an understanding of campus climate: it is clear that racism, sexism, bigotry, and hatred still exist in our universities and beyond.

As a community, we should respond with the grace, sensitivity and civility afforded us through the manners we learned from our parents, and their parents before them.
Hence, as a community, we demand the following:

1) We call for a public apology from Alexandra Wallace. Her words and actions are not in line with the UCLA Student Code of Conduct.
2) We call for UCLA to take the appropriate disciplinary measures befitting of Wallace’s violation against the UCLA Student Code of Conduct and UCLA’s Principle of Community
3) We call for UCLA to issue a statement addressing this incident. UCLA must demonstrate its commitment to a culture of diversity, respect, tolerance, and acceptance for all communities by standing against such acts.
4) We call for the UCLA Academic Senate to pass a requirement in the general education curriculum grounded in the UCLA Principles of Community.

Allow this event to help us bear in mind the continual relevance of ethnic studies at UCLA and beyond. While ethnic studies programs are crumbling at CSULA and struggling for a place at UCSC, let us remember why it is important now more than ever to continue to support the development, sustainability and growth of ethnic studies.

Let this incite an honest discussion on what it truly means to be a community founded upon mutual respect. Do not turn this into a riot. Do not turn this into an attack. We are better than that. Allow us to come together in solidarity and address the matter where it truly stems: as a reflection of the gross misunderstanding of our communities and the hatred that grows from it.