8-23-2001     

Where do we go from last May's historic victory of reversing the ban on affirmative action?
Now is the time to reverse the resegregation of the UC!

 
On May 16, 2001, when the University of California regents were forced unanimously to reverse their ban on affirmative action, one chapter of American history was ended and another begun. With this victory the nation turned a corner.

The national attack on affirmative action of the last six years was set in motion by the UC regents' July 1995 vote banning affirmative action in admissions and hiring (SP-1 and SP-2). Under the leadership of Pete Wilson, Ward Connerly and the Republican Party, California led the nation in initiating an attack on affirmative action and all the gains made toward integration and equality by the last civil rights movement.

That originating attack has now been forced back under mass pressure from the new civil rights movement. Every further attack on affirmative action across the country must now be placed in the context of the defeat of the opening attack and of the determined mass civil rights movement that these attacks have provoked.

Students at the University of California at Berkeley have played an absolutely central role in this historic victory and in the movement that won it. Through this key role, we have led the nation and changed the political climate of the country. (The recent surprise decision by the Bush administration to intervene in favor of affirmative action in Adarand, the federal contracting case about to come before the US Supreme Court, is a remarkable testament to the change in climate that has occurred.)

The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) has been the organizer of this historic victory. BAMN was created in response to the initial UC regents vote banning affirmative action in the Summer of 1995. Starting then, we campaigned tirelessly to reverse the ban on affirmative action in the University of California. On March 8, 2001 BAMN led a spirited mass march of many thousands of high school and college students through the streets of Berkeley demanding that the UC regents reverse the ban. We collected over 30,000 signatures on petitions to reverse the ban.

BAMN has been at the forefront of the development of mass struggle in response to these attacks. With the new civil rights movement that has been built, California has become a beacon of progress. Over the next period, California will lead the nation again. UC Berkeley students have the opportunity and the responsibility to make sure that the direction we take as a state and a nation is toward integration, equality, progress and justice.  
 

Where do we go from this historic victory?

It is a glaring injustice and an untenable contradiction that California is now a majority minority state while segregation and inequality increase and opportunities narrow for Chicana/o, Latina/o, black, Native American and other underrepresented minorities.

The segregation and inequality that exist now in our education system and in other aspects of our social life is incompatible with the democracy and justice to which most Californians aspire. A society which accepts segregation is a society that lies to itself.

The reversal of the ban on affirmative action in the UC system opens up a historic opportunity for our public university system and our state. It opens up a chance for society to stop lying to itself-it opens up a chance for a qualifiedly brighter future, a future of equality and sister- and brotherhood where the ability of all is developed to the fullest.

For students here, at UC Berkeley, this means our new movement must fight for the UC system, including specifically its flagship schools, to be representative of what is democratic, open, and just about our society. Our universities cannot be the centers of knowledge and enlightenment that they ought to be if they remain part of the sordid, racist tradition of the exclusion and marginalization of Latina/o, black and other underrepresented minority people. Our society cannot move forward without thoroughgoing integration. The education system is the place this fight has been fought out for the whole society in the past; it will be the place it is fought out again now.
 

What the new civil rights movement in California must do now:

• We must fight for a real, substantial increase in the numbers of underrepresented minority students at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego. We must reverse the resegregation of the UC into a tracked, two-tiered system.

• A central part of this fight must be the elimination of the SAT 1 requirement for admission to the UC. The SAT test requirement unfairly and unreasonably excludes vastly disproportionate numbers of underrepresented minority high school students from enrolling at the flagship UC schools. Knowledge must be the aim of education, not stratifying humanity into ranks and orders. Standardized tests are fundamental parts of both the ideology and mechanism of the inequality of this society.

• Our movement must fight to reverse the devastating impact of SP-1, SP-2 and Proposition 209 on the hiring of underrepresented minority faculty at the flagship UC schools.

• Our movement must also fight to increase the number of women faculty at the flagship UC schools where the number of women faculty has declined sharply in the wake of the attack on affirmative action.

With the growing consciousness and broader mass action that will come as the new civil rights movement develops, we will have the chance to change the fundamental segregation and social inequality that characterize life in California and across the country. California is a harbinger for the rest of the country demographically, socially and politically. We can begin a struggle now to make real the promise of integration and equal opportunity that has been talked about so much in our society, yet not seen.

The momentous victory in reversing the ban on affirmative action in the UC system has shown that mass struggle can win, that it can turn history around.

Questions of racism, integration, and equality for black, Latina/o and other minority people have generally been the axis around which the history of this country moves. The point of departure of the new civil rights movement must be the fight against racism. Our movement must also continue to develop as a movement for women's equality and for lesbian/gay liberation.

Our movement must fight not only the pervasive, open sexism against women that exists throughout society-the discrimination, harassment, mistreatment, abuse and rape-we must also dig deeper to the related fundamental inequality of power between men and women in everyday social relations. The new civil rights movement gives us the chance to expose and change the caste-type relations between women and men that set gender and sexual roles on profoundly unequal footing. Likewise, the movement must fight anti-lesbian/gay bigotry both in its open forms of prejudice and violence and it must also fight to liberate our society from its misconception and self-deception that human sexuality is static, rigidly defined and simple.

We must understand that it is mass struggle and mass struggle alone that will change the social consciousness, the social norms and the inequality of social relations. Building the new civil rights movement is the way to move California and our whole society forward.
 

A Plan for the Fall

In the second week of October, leading up to the October 16 UC-Berkeley Academic Senate meeting, BAMN will be organizing a Week of Education and Action on the various subjects confronting the new civil rights movement. We will be bringing in academics and experts to speak on a wide variety of issues, including standardized testing and segregation in primary education. We will also organize people to attend the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing for the two US Supreme Court-bound University of Michigan affirmative action cases. These two cases are very likely to set legal precedent for the use of affirmative action in higher education across the country. A defeat at the Circuit Court level would immediately bar colleges and universities throughout Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky from using affirmative action. These cases are this generation's Brown v. Board of Education.

At the beginning of summer, over the weekend of June 1-3, 2001 the founding conference of the new civil rights movement was held in Ann Arbor at the Law School of the University of Michigan. Representatives and leaders from the movement in California went to the conference. One of several resolutions passed by democratic vote was the Conference Declaration, which reads in part: "Our aim is to build broad and popular struggle to defeat the attacks on affirmative action and to fight all forms of racism, inequality, oppression and injustice in this society. We understand that building the new independent civil rights movement is necessary to transform American society, and to win equality and justice for all."

These are the tasks we must set ourselves. The last civil rights movement won equality before the law and outlawed segregation. Our new movement must win equality and integration in real life.