April 16, 2003
Remarks by George Lipsitz
I have a friend on campus who works on the grounds crew. His name is Brother Hareef. Whenever I run into him, he stops me and asks, "Hey, Professor! How's our students doing?" I always tell him, "You know our students, Brother Hareef, they are the best. They are the crown of creation." In these exchanges, Brother Hareef lets me know how much it means to him to see black students succeed here, how many of his own hopes ride with them.
If I ran into Brother Hareef today though, I would have to say that our students are not doing so well, that they are hurting because they are surrounded by haters, because they are worn down by the climate of white entitlement and recreational hate that prevails on this campus.
We are here to show our solidarity and to protest the posting of a racist image in a fraternity recruitment flyer, to protest the reversal of a student government election won by candidates of color and their allies but fraudulently taken from them, and to protest Ward Connerly's latest creation, the impending ballot initiative in California to ban the collection of information about racial inequality, to suppress free speech and free inquiry in order to again subsidize organized ignorance. Regent Connerly thinks the best way to solve hate crimes is by destroying the evidence.
But we do not come to the Price Center today as supplicants or victims. We assemble here now as warriors against white supremacy, against homophobia, against misogyny. Over and over again, we have been witnesses to the sickness that permeates this campus. The puerile displays of racism that purport to pass for humor really reveal the emptiness of their creators. People who do not know who they are, need to demonize someone else. A false subject requires a false object. A self so insecure about its own worth needs other people's pain to secure its pleasure. The giddy titillation of racial transgression exemplified in a fraternity rush poster using images of the Ku Klux Klan is only the latest example of what we hear every day on this campus, what we see scrawled on its restroom walls, what we read in campus periodicals. Sadism demands a story. Empty, vacuous, and amoral individuals need to perform cruelty to mask their own lack of convictions or purpose.
Who are these people so obsessed with images of us? They are the Progeny of Proposition 209 - the harvest of Ward Connerly's labors. By and large, they come from privileged families. Their wealth won them entry into schools in segregated suburbs: schools with advanced placement courses, tutors, college advisors, reading specialists, speech therapists, and psychological counselors. Inherited wealth enabled them to purchase the Kaplan and Princeton Review courses to increase their scores on standardized tests, and their parents' money enabled them to take the SAT test as many times as they wanted. Yet despite all of these advantages and all of these privileges, they still performed only incrementally better than working class and impoverished Black and Latino and Asian applicants for admission who enjoyed none of those advantages. That is why they needed the end of affirmative action in order to squeak into UCSD.
We were told that these students were admitted because of the content of their character, not because of the color of their skin - even though for most of them it was precisely the skin color of their parents that gave them so many unearned advantages and unjust enrichments. And when they got to UCSD, they could not resist writing racist graffiti, posting racist images, publishing racist "humor" pieces. They did so with cowardly confidence, certain that their overwhelming numerical predominance on campus made them immune from the consequences of their actions. This my friends, is the content of their character.
But here and now, the numerical equation is different. Today the Price Center is filled with people of all colors who consider ourselves enemies of white entitlement and recreational hate. And we are not here alone. We have received messages of support from some of our brilliant and strong Black alumni all across the country and all around the world.
Gaye Johnson of the class of 1994, now a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, writes that the fraternity poster we are here to protest is a kind of "thank you" note to the UCSD administration for creating an environment where images of terror and brutality can find a home. She writes, "Lynching is not a thing of the past, and Matthew Shephard reminds us that it is not just a black thing." See this for what it is: an opportunity for Black students, Chicana and Chicano students, white students, gay students, and all of us in between to say we refuse to allow our university to say this is okay.
Jason Cooksey of the class of 1997, currently practicing law in the firm of Seyfarth Shaw in Sacramento, offers us his full support and reminds us that this incident is a reminder not only that racial hatred exists but that the struggle continues. Alondra Nelson of the class of 1994, now on the faculty at Yale University condemns what she terms "racist propaganda deliberately created to deny students of African descent and other students of color at UCSD the opportunity to learn in a safe environment." Nelson calls upon the campus to devote more resources for curricula "that will ensure all university graduates are educated about the history of racial and sexual violence that was attendant to the founding of this country and which persists today."
Dudley El-Shabazz, class of 1999, now an English teacher in Japan, writes that he wishes he could be here today. He points out that "people of color go to college and eventually the corporate work force and we do nothing but find a way to blend in with dominate culture. Yet conversely there is almost still no ?give? from the other side in modern American, which is incredible." Kweli Coleman, class of 2000, currently enrolled in law school at UC Davis sends this message: "As an alumna, I take pride in presenting myself as a graduate of UCSD. We must all speak out to make sure that our university lives out the ideals of respect for all people and inclusiveness."
Johnson, Cooksey, Nelson, El Shabazz, and Coleman came to UCSD when affirmative action in admissions was still in place. They have gone on to successful professional careers. As students they were young, gifted, and Black. If the Ku Klux Klan poster we assemble here to protest is any indication, ending affirmative action replaced the young, gifted, and Black with the dumb, shiftless, and slack. The doors to UCSD are now closed to the future Gaye Johnsons and Jack Cookseys and Dudley El Shabazzs and Kweli Colemans. But they are open to the Children of Proposition 209, to people who were born on third base but think they hit a triple, people born with silver spoons in their mouths, but have not stirred since, people who talk about justice, when they really mean just us, people who intone pieties about "brotherhood" - but they do not mean our brothers and they have not been to our 'hood.
But these lost white children should be pitied, not despised. They are victims of the lack of diversity in their lives, of the sameness of the suburbs in which they live, of the impoverished view of U.S. society that prevails in the affluent schools they attended. They are like the townspeople in Michelle Shocked's song about growing up in Gilmer, Texas - "their lives ran in circles so small, they thought they'd seen it all." The people who have been committing these hate crimes have not spent enough time around people of color, around gays and lesbians, around immigrants, around people with disabilities. They do not know what the world looks like. They are provincial and parochial.
But when students are untaught, you have to blame their teachers. So we are not going to hate, we are going to educate. We are going to deliberate and cogitate, agitate, and demonstrate, and if we have to, we are going to litigate. But most of all, we are going to create - create a campus and a world where the dynamics of difference eclipse the false securities of sameness.
We see today as the beginning of the end of the Culture of White Entitlement at UCSD. It is a culture reinforced by retrograde admissions policy, by a wretched record in recruiting and retaining faculty of color. It is a problem for the whole university because it promotes an epistemology of ignorance, producing people who not only do not know, but even worse, people who do not want to know. They do not know that a picture of a lynching is not funny because the long shadow of lynchings hangs over us today in many ways, from the thousands of unresolved complaints about police brutality and racial profiling to the racially imbalanced application of the death penalty, from environmental racism to housing segregation, from education inequality to employment discrimination.
The empty selves who engage in recreational hate and find meaning in the culture of white entitlement have not spent enough time with us. They have not been to the black Graduations to hear us when we join our voices in "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro national anthem written by James Weldon Johnson that reminds us of all "our weary years" and "our silent tears" about the stormy "road we trod" and the bitterness of "the chastening rod." They have not been to the Raza graduation and heard our Chicano/a brothers and sisters chant "Aqui estamos y no nos vamos" (We are here and we are not going away).
In their own incompetent way, the haters on our campus have done us a favor. They have helped us see that white supremacy is a sickness, but that anti-racism is the cure. They have helped us learn the wisdom in the words of the great Oneida poet Roberta Hill when she says, "their fear of the dark is not my identity."
We come from different backgrounds and traditions. We speak different languages and eat different kinds of food. We do not look the same, think the same, or act the same. We do not share one kind of patriotism, one kind of sexuality, one kind of religion. And that is our strength. Our differences give us different optics on power and different ways of solving problems. When it comes to social justice and human dignity, we can unite and we can fight, side by side. We have had a rough year and a rough week. But today is a beautiful day. Today we start to fight back, and that feels good, and we can sing out in the words of the James Weldon song that has sustained many before us:
"Facing the rising sun, of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won."