The Politics of Race and Class at CUNY
By Christopher Day, Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Newspaper, June/July 1997

On Thursday, March 27 about 600 students gathered in City Hall Park to
protest proposed budget cuts to the City University of New York (CUNY).
Students came from at least a dozen schools. This demonstration was not
going to turn into a battle with the cops like the 1995 demonstration of
25,000 students. But nonetheless, it demonstrated the existence of
several hundred radical students at CUNY who will turn out for a rally
even when the movement is at a low point. Reflecting the composition of
CUNY better than previous demonstrations, Black and Latino students were
a solid majority of the crowd and the speakers. After the rally much of
the crowd marched to the nearest train station and took the subway to
Harlem where they joined students at City College in their campus-based
“Day of Outrage” against the budget cuts.

The fight against the budget cuts at CUNY has involved complex questions
of race and class. The Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!), which
organized the demonstration, is a broad-based, open and democratic
organization rooted primarily at CUNY and dedicated to fighting the
cuts. March 27 was the product of SLAM!’s efforts to develop a
principled politics around these problems. Its efforts to navigate the
difficult questions of class and race offer valuable lessons for
activists facing similar questions elsewhere.

Before 1969

The difficulties facing the CUNY student movement today are rooted in
part in CUNY’s historical place in the social structure of New York
City. CUNY was established over a century ago. From then until 1969 CUNY
served an almost exclusively white working-class student body, and for
most of its existence was free. For European immigrants CUNY offered a
unique opportunity to escape the working class.

Defenders of CUNY often like to emphasize its historically working-class
character, as a way of connecting its historical mission of serving the
children of European immigrants with its current responsibility for the
education of Black, Latino and Asian students. But this emphasis ignores
CUNY’s historical function as an instrument of white supremacy.

Unequal access to education has been one of the main ways of keeping
people of color in poverty and in a state of social subordination in
this country. Prior to 1969 CUNY had strict academic entrance
requirements. This in effect excluded the students who were being
shortchanged by the New York Public Schools. CUNY’s almost all-white
composition was the natural consequence of the de facto segregation and
inequality of the New York Public Schools.

CUNY was a free ticket out of poverty available only to whites. Not
every white worker’s child would attend CUNY, but so long as the New
York Public Schools offered a better quality education to white kids,
CUNY helped assure that whites would occupy the best jobs and escape the
worst ones. A free college education was one of the benefits of
membership in the club of whiteness.

The glaringly racist nature of this system became all too apparent over
the course of the 1960s. The civil rights movement had put equal access
to education on the political agenda. But many liberal white New Yorkers
owed their comfortable jobs to a University that was for all intents and
purposes as segregated as any down South.

A small group of Black and Puerto Rican students were admitted into CUNY
as part of the SEEK Program begun in the mid-1960s. These students were
treated as second-class citizens. They were even denied the right to
vote in student government elections. In 1969 a number of these Black
and Puerto Rican students occupied the south campus of City College and
demanded that CUNY be opened to all New York City High School graduates.
They won. Their sweeping victory can only be understood if viewed in the
context of the times.

Open Admissions and Affirmative Action

Less than a year earlier the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King
sparked urban uprisings in over one hundred cities across the US. The
almost all-white teachers union had gone out on strike in 1968 against
community control of the New York public schools. The US armed forces in
Vietnam were collapsing as the result of the determination of the
Vietnamese people to defeat them and a student-led mass movement against
the war. In France, Czechoslovakia and Mexico, student movements allied
with workers and other sectors of society pushed their respective
governments to the brink of collapse. The powers that be were scared and
were giving away everything they could to pacify the people. Only in
such a context could a radical idea like open admissions become a
reality.

Open admissions at CUNY was an enormous victory for people of color in
New York City. Starting in the late ‘60s the government and a number of
major corporations were initiating Affirmative Action programs. More
than any other school in the country CUNY has produced the educated
Black and Latino people to fill the jobs opened by civil rights and
affirmative action. Within a few years after open admissions began CUNY
was graduating more Blacks than all of the historically Black colleges
combined.

While open admissions helped create a Black and Brown middle class that
helped “subdue” the insurgencies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it had other
effects as well. At the 1969 City College takeover students also
demanded and won the creation of a Black Studies department. As students
of color poured into CUNY, Black, Latino, and Asian studies departments
expanded.

Open admissions and affirmative action were designed to transform
insurgent young people of color into loyal servants of the system. The
various ethnic studies departments and similar programs have at times
undermined that mission and have given crucial assistance to student
struggles. Many of the faculty hired to staff the ethnic studies
departments were veterans of the liberation struggles of the 1960s and
‘70s and sought to use their positions to open up even more political
space. Three CUNY campuses located in Black and Latino communities—City
College, Medgar Evers and York—effectively became organizing centers for
those communities.

The Long Backlash

Almost from the moment open admissions began at CUNY there has been a
backlash against it. Disguised as a defense of “standards of academic
excellence,” the underlying thrust of the backlash has been the
restoration of the old CUNY that had been an instrument of white
privilege. In 1976, the same year people of color became the majority of
CUNY students, CUNY began to charge for tuition. The Tuition Assistance
Program (TAP), a state program that paid the full tuition of the poorest
students and a portion of tuition for other students in need, was also
established then, to guarantee that charging tuition would not
effectively end open admissions.

Since 1977 there has been a relentless effort to roll back open
admissions and more recently to reorganize the university to make it a
better servant of the ruling class. Yearly layoffs and program cuts have
been overwhelmingly directed at the CUNY campuses with the most Black
and Latino students. City College in particular has taken the biggest
hits. As if to underscore the white supremacist nature of the cuts, in
the early 1990s while it was forcing deep cuts on the rest of CUNY, the
New York state legislature allocated $400 million to build an entirely
new campus for the College of Staten Island, CUNY’s whitest senior
college.

In 1995 the New York state legislature passed cuts to TAP that meant for
the first time the poorest students would not have all of their tuition
covered. Part-time students lost all of their TAP funding. These two
measures were a direct attack on the poorest students. The students
affected are overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

The pressure to roll back open admissions has increased dramatically
during the 1990s. Affirmative action has become a convenient scapegoat
for the economic beating that many white folks are currently taking.
Every year that CUNY graduates students of color it creates more job
competition for increasingly anxious whites. Bashing CUNY has in this
context become a popular sport for much of the white working class and
for politicians seeking their votes.

Building A Multi-Racial Student Movement

The key to beating back the attacks on CUNY is building a broad but
militant, politically independent and multi-racial student movement. No
single race or nationality predominates at CUNY. In order to mobilize
large numbers of students on campuses across CUNY it is necessary to
build multi-racial unity. But that unity can’t be built on the basis of
simplistic slogans like “Black and White, Unite and Fight!” It must be
based on an understanding of the white supremacist character of the
attacks on CUNY and open admissions.

One of the biggest obstacles to building the kind of multi-racial
movement that can win is the temptation to build the movement on the
basis of the lowest common denominator and the narrowest of demands such
as simply opposing the tuition increase. The problem with this approach
is that it doesn’t deal with the fact that the cuts are coming down
differently on different people.

The core of the movement at CUNY has always been Black and Latino
students because they are the ones paying the highest price for each
round of cuts. For a white student from Staten Island going to CUNY
because it is cheaper than SUNY (the state university system), a $400
tuition increase will make them $400 poorer. For a Dominican student
from Washington Heights, a $400 tuition increase may mean they can’t go
back to school next year. Fighting the cuts has a different sort of
urgency for different students. In order for white students to help
build a multi-racial movement they need to acknowledge the way that
white privilege operates within CUNY and the larger society and commit
themselves to fighting it even when it goes against their own immediate
interests.

Power and Privilege in the Movement

The movement needs to deal not only with the workings of white power and
privilege in CUNY and in society but also within the movement itself.
White students are more likely to have the time to go to lots of
meetings than students of color because they are generally better off.
They are also likely to bring to those meetings skills and resources
that enable them to maneuver more easily and to make sure that their
voices get heard and their ideas get acted on. More broadly there is a
sort of white leftist political culture that is profoundly alienating to
many students of color. So the question isn’t just who can go to
meetings, but who feels comfortable at them and who gets heard.

These inequalities are clear in the patterns of attendance at CUNY-wide
SLAM! meetings. Four of the senior colleges are pretty consistently
represented—Hunter, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and City College. The
community colleges, which are mostly people of color, are consistently
under-represented at CUNY-wide meetings.

White Chauvinism on the Left

Building a multi-racial movement is made doubly difficult by the white
chauvinism of many of the supposedly radical or revolutionary groups
that hover around the student movement. “White chauvinism” refers to the
ideas and practices that consciously or unconsciously give priority to
the interests of white people at the expense of people of color.

Because it is rooted in the racist nature of this society, practically
all white activists engage in some form of white chauvinism at one time
or another and many activists of color have internalized white
chauvinist thinking. No organization or individual is immune from white
chauvinist errors.

At CUNY white chauvinism is often expressed in the form of slogans and
demands that don’t deal explicitly with the selectively racist nature of
the cuts to CUNY. It can mean refusing to see why defending ethnic
studies programs is a priority even when other programs are under just
as serious attack.

The Trouble With Trots

Within the CUNY movement, white chauvinism has been expressed most
clearly in the political perspectives and practice of several Trotskyist
organizations. The main Trotskyist groups active at CUNY have been the
International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Spartacist League (SL),
the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), the League for a Revolutionary Party (LRP),
and the Revolutionary Socialist Group (RSG—a now-defunct collective
based at the College of Staten Island). In different measures, for each
group Trotskyism has provided an ideological framework for the defense
of white chauvinism in the student movement. Much of the criticism of
the theory and practice of the Trotskyist groups active at CUNY that
follows often applies in other circumstances to groups with other
perspectives. Trotskyism just provides a particularly naked example of
what is a much deeper problem on the broader left. It should also be
said that not every Trotskyist group is equally guilty of all of the
following charges. For example, another Trotskyist group, Solidarity,
also has members at CUNY but plays a much more constructive role in the
movement. The extent to which Trotskyist groups do good things is the
extent to which they have distanced themselves from Trotskyist methods
described here and learned lessons from actual struggles taking place
around them.

Class Reductionism

The first problem with Trotskyism is the practice of reducing all
questions down to class struggle. Racism, sexism and homophobia are
treated simply as “tools of the bosses” used to divide the working
class, rather than systems of oppression with their own logic that
intersect with class oppression and with each other. But in the real
world the working class is divided along lines of race, nationality,
age, gender, and sexuality. Those divisions are not simply the
reflections of ruling-class ideology. They reflect concrete and material
contradictions within the working class itself. White working-class men,
for example, obtain benefits from patriarchy and white supremacy that
undermine the basis for their solidarity with the rest of the class.

In CUNY the Trotskyists emphasize the class nature of the cuts and the
fight against them. But the cuts don’t come down equally on the whole
class. Pretending that they do leads to a very wooden understanding of
the basis on which to build an effective movement against the cuts. For
example the 7,000 students threatened with being pushed out of school in
order to fulfill their workfare assignments are overwhelmingly women of
color with children. Who should those students turn to to get their
needs met first? Certainly not the unions which have only given lip
service to organizing workfare workers. In practice they will largely
turn to their communities, and in particular their sisters, mothers,
aunts and grandmothers who share their experiences trying to raise their
kids on welfare.When the LRP or the RSG doggedly argue that our first
task is to reach out to the rank and file of organized labor and call
for a general strike, they promote a mechanical view of who the working
class is and where its power lies. This view cuts those 7,000 students
out of the picture entirely.

The currently unionized sectors of the working class are for the most
part a relatively privileged minority of the working class. If they are
ever going to go out on strike in support of CUNY students or welfare
recipients, it will only happen when CUNY students and welfare
recipients organize themselves first. To abstractly call for a general
strike in this context is empty posturing that obscures the importance
of building independent organizations like SLAM.

Theory and Practice

The white chauvinism of the Trotskyists results from their view of the
relationship between theory and practice. For the Trotskyists the
“correct line” exists independent of its actual practical application
and can be derived from the writings of a handful of great leaders
(Marx, Lenin and Trotsky). These geniuses have supposedly distilled the
main lessons from the class struggle in general and the all-important
Russian Revolution in particular. The Trotskyists differ among
themselves on the precise interpretation of the lessons and their exact
application in the present. But they have in common a method: their
practice is based on an already fully-developed body of theory derived
from a hard core of principles articulated by their great leaders.

This “method” contrasts with any notion that the development of
revolutionary theory is an ongoing process intimately wrapped up with
the course of the actual struggles of living, breathing human beings. In
general Trotskyism has not incorporated the insights of the
anti-colonial movements, the New Left, the Black liberation movement,
feminism or the other social movements of the latter half of the 20th
century. Revolutionary theory, if it is to remain revolutionary, must
always be a synthesis of the lessons of the past and the struggles of
the present. It must be informed by a profound willingness to learn from
others. The Trotskyists’ mechanical insistence on particular tactics
like building a labor party or calling for a general strike flows from
their vanguardist self-conception as the leaders who bring the
accumulated wisdom of the past to the ignorant masses.

Revolutionaries should not be shy about arguing for their ideas within
mass movements. But our responsibility is not so much to bring ideas
from outside the movement as to assist the movement in summing up its
own experiences. Sometimes historical experiences like that of the
Russian Revolution can help clarify a particular point. But the richest
source of insights is always the struggles of the people themselves. We
must always be as open to learning from the people as teaching them.

Democracy in the Real World

There has been an ongoing struggle over SLAM!’s structure. This struggle
shows well how the Trotskyists’ method undercuts the revolutionary
tendencies of the mass movement. The Trotskyists have consistently
opposed SLAM!s federative structure, which seeks to guarantee equal
representation for each participating campus group. Instead they have
argued for an open city-wide coalition operating on the basis of
“one-person one-vote” for whoever shows up at the city-wide meetings.

In many circumstances the structure the Trotskyists advocate might make
sense. But for the CUNY movement it has been a disaster. The problem is
that few CUNY students have the time to attend city-wide meetings in
addition to going to meetings on their own campuses and doing any sort
of organizing. This means that open city-wide “one-person one-vote”
meetings are easily dominated by determined sects that couldn't be
bothered with the day-to-day work of building a movement on the campuses
but who are pleased as punch to shoot their mouths off (and vote) at
city-wide meetings.

The decision to organize SLAM! on a federative basis with delegates for
each campus group was not derived from some abstract principle that
federative structures are always preferable. Sometimes they aren’t. But
many participants in the 1995 CUNY upsurge concluded that the prospects
for building a lasting movement were wrecked by the lack of any
structure accountable to people doing the work on the campuses. The
Trotskyists weren’t interested in any such summation process. Their
conclusions just recapitulated their established doctrine.

The federative structure has been far from perfect. But as a principle
it has kept SLAM! conscious of the conditions on the campuses and has
prevented many of the abuses that took place in 1995.

Building an Organization That Will Last

SLAM! was born in 1995 as a result of the successes and failures of the
1995 CUNY Coalition. Rather than the “United Front” of leftists sects
imagined by the Trotskyists, SLAM! sought to be a different kind of
coalition, composed of open and democratic campus-based coalitions. If
the sects wanted to participate they would have to get involved on the
campus level. If they wanted a voice in city-wide decisions they would
have to earn the trust of the campus-based coalitions and get elected as
delegates to the city-wide meetings.

SLAM! was also founded on the idea that the fight against the budget
cuts is long term and won’t be won by ad-hoc coalitions brought together
around a single demonstration. Accordingly SLAM! is committed to
functioning in between budget crises and to participating in other
struggles like the fights against welfare reform and police brutality.
SLAM! is still a coalition in the sense that its members come from a
variety of political perspectives. But SLAM! isn’t ad-hoc—it is
committed to building ongoing independent radical student organization.

This commitment made SLAM! an unwelcome place for groups like the ISO
that put building their own party ahead of building lasting independent
and democratic mass organizations. The ad-hoc coalition is their
preferred vehicle precisely because they can always ditch it when the
struggle reaches a low point—which is exactly what they did this Spring
at Queens College.

This year the ISO and other Trotskyist groups insisted that SLAM! was an
organization and not a coalition and offered as evidence for their
position the fact that they weren’t part of it. While self-serving,
there was however an element of truth in the ISO’s claim. As long as
SLAM! defines itself as a coalition instead of as an organization it is
vulnerable to the efforts of the Trotskyists or others like them to roll
back the advances it had made in terms of structure, continuity, and a
multi-issue orientation.

SLAM! has kept together a collection of activists from a bunch of
campuses who, while ideologically diverse, share a commitment to
building an independent student movement. This may not seem like a
tremendous accomplishment—after all our goal is to stop the cuts to CUNY
and win back free tuition and open admissions.

But the existence of an ongoing independent radical student organization
at CUNY is going to bear fruit once the movement picks up again, and
will play a crucial role in the political development of the broader
movement. We may see the results of our work next semester or it may be
years from now. But the work we do now lays the groundwork for the next
mass movement, as well as training generations of future organizers.
These are the tasks that SLAM! is taking on as it continues to mature,
develop, and fight for our educational future.*****