Student leaders fail to fight racist purge
By Daily Bruin Staff
June 4, 1998 9:00 p.m.
Friday, June 5, 1998
Student leaders fail to fight racist purge
REVOLUTION: Peaceful tactics not enough to send message that
arrests won’t be tolerated
By Michelle Oberman
The Spartacus Youth Club (SYC), a youth group of the
revolutionary socialist Spartacist League, denounces the arrests of
students protesting the racist purge of the campus through
Proposition 209.
At the May 15 rally against the inauguration of Chancellor
Carnesale four students were arrested, two charged with resisting a
peace officer and two with assault. At the May 19 rally, students
peacefully occupying Royce Hall were met by police wielding riot
sticks, tear gas and riot shields. Eighty-five protesters were
arrested for unlawful assembly. The SYC demands that all charges
against all protesters be immediately dropped!
Organizers of the Days of Defiance say this is only the
beginning. The truth is that they are only a repeat of the same
impotent pressure politics used to "fight" Proposition 187 in 1994
and Proposition 209 in 1996. As outraged students amassed outside
the May 15 inauguration, student leaders were inside directly
appealing to the chancellor and administration, whose job is to
enforce the bourgeoisie’s racist dictates.
Students have complained about being kicked out of the
inauguration. After all, they had a tickets. Well, what were they
doing in there to begin with? This only shows where these student
leaders’ allegiance lies and to whom they choose to appeal. Abolish
the regents, chancellor and administration! The university should
be run by those who work and study here!
Taking their collaboration with the administration to a suicidal
level, these same student leaders at the May 19 demonstration
worked hand-in-hand with the police and chancellor in negotiating
the terms on which students occupying Royce Hall would be arrested.
Cops are the armed fist of the capitalist state who mete out brutal
and murderous repression against ghetto and barrio youth, student
protesters and striking workers.
These student leaders did exactly what the cops and
administration wanted: They corralled and diffused student outrage
over the admission rates into impotent appeals to the campus
administration and "peaceful," "legal," moral-witness protests and
arrests that only work to demoralize protesters and derail any
genuine struggle.
This wretched strategy flows directly from their bankrupt
politics and program of limiting the struggle for equality within
the framework of racist American capitalism. Unable to counter our
political arguments and afraid of the effect our socialist program
would have on protesters, the student leaders opted to politically
censor us by not allowing us to address protesting students.
Initially, they cited "logistical" reasons.
When we persisted, they explicitly informed us we were being
censored because of our communist politics. Also, when another
student threatened to tear down our sign on Indonesia denouncing
Islamic reaction and calling for women’s liberation through
socialist revolution, the protest leadership alibied this by
demanding that we comply because we were "disrespecting
Muslims."
What these self-appointed censors fear is the clash of political
opinions that would reveal the bankruptcy of their program. With
this and all the incessant, "unproductive" meetings with – and
appeals to – the chancellor, it is difficult to believe that even
the student leaders take themselves seriously.
We defend affirmative action against the bourgeoisie’s racist
assaults and have fully participated in the recent protests, but we
recognize that it cannot even begin to break the chains that have
shackled African Americans in this country for centuries. The
rollback of affirmative action proves that the gains achieved were
fundamentally limited and reversible because it did not address the
root cause of racist oppression – the capitalist system.
The racial bias in education in the U.S. derives from the
capitalist rulers’ forcible segregation of African Americans at the
bottom of society as an oppressed race and color caste. African
American oppression is the bedrock of racist American capitalism,
and any fight for black equality runs smack against the entire
system of capitalist exploitation.
Against the sectoralist politics of the various student groups
who organize students along racial and ethnic lines, the SYC fights
to ally anti-racist students with the real social power of the
multiracial proletariat in struggle for jobs, education and a
future for all.
While the student leaders chose to commemorate Malcolm X’s
birthday by passing out lists of Democratic Party candidates to
vote for, we solidarize with Malcolm X’s statement that "a vote for
a Democrat is a vote for a Dixiecrat." The Democrats and
Republicans are twin parties of racist capitalism.
We fight to build the multiracial class struggle workers party –
the tribune of all the people – necessary to lead the working class
at the head of all the oppressed in the struggle for equality and
socialist revolution.
Drop all charges against the anti-racist protesters! Defend
affirmative action and more! Fight for open admissions, no tuition
and a state- paid stipend! Full citizenship rights for all
immigrants! For black liberation through socialist revolution! Pack
the courthouse on June 15th and 19th to defend the student
demonstrators!
