Racist Graffiti at York Targets Black Students

(Young Spartacus pages)

On January 24, hundreds of students, organized by the York University Black Students’ Alliance (YUBSA), rallied at York University in Toronto to protest racist graffiti scrawled on and around the doors of YUBSA’s office. Reading “N-----s go back to Africa” and “all n-----s must die,” this cowardly act was a deadly serious provocation to racist violence against blacks.

This attack takes place in the context of a series of racist provocations across the U.S., where nooses have been hung at workplaces, homes and schools to terrorize black people. Supporters of the Trotskyist League and Spartacus Youth Club participated in the York rally, adding our voices in protest and discussing with students about articles in Workers Vanguard on the 50,000-strong protest against the racist frame-up of six black youth in Jena, Louisiana last September. Students were also interested in our newspapers and pamphlets on the fight to free U.S. death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

At the rally, York University president Mamdouh Shoukri attempted to take the stage, only to be rebuffed by angry students critical of the administration’s failure to respond to the racist slurs. As president, Shoukri’s job is to ensure that the university serves the needs of the capitalist ruling class. To this end, the York administration has targeted opponents of Zionist terror in the Near East and other political activists for repression. Immediately before the rally, a woman student, Amy Hussey, was hauled into a security office and banned from the university for 12 hours based on allegations that she tagged the slogan “White supremacists go back to HELL” on the walls of the Student Centre. We say: Abolish the administration! Those who work, study and teach at the universities should run them—for worker/student/teacher control!

There were calls from many quarters for “more security” at York. The executive director of the Student Centre said they have “given consideration to installing CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras,” while YUBSA, joined by the York Federation of Students and the reformist Young Communist League, demanded that METRAC, the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children, be hired to conduct a “safety audit” of the campus. METRAC, which touts itself as being an “anti-oppression” grassroots organization, is essentially an arms-length agency of “community policing.” METRAC’s first Board of Directors was headed by then-Police Commissioner Jane Pepino, and it boasts of working closely with the police in all its ventures. Located adjacent to the heavily minority Jane-Finch corridor in Toronto, York is already regularly patrolled by uniformed security guards, who harass black youth coming onto the campus to visit their friends. Calls for tightened “security” will necessarily come at the expense of black and other minority youth. Cops off campus!

YUBSA speakers also expressed solidarity with the recent walkout of black jail guards at the Don Jail who had received vile racist death threats from other guards. Marxists oppose racist attacks regardless of what sector of society is the target. But jail guards are part of the bourgeois state—the capitalists’ institution of repression against the working class, the poor and minorities. Looking to the state or its agents as a potential ally in the struggle against racism is a deadly dangerous illusion.

From the platform of the January 24 protest, the call was put forward for “black schools” to address the systemic racism faced by black students in the school system. Toronto school board trustees recently voted to approve measures that would create public schools with an “Africentric” curriculum. The idea that the everyday, grinding racial oppression faced by black youth can be addressed by an adjusted curriculum in separate schools is a reactionary utopia. The Spartacus Youth Club fights for free, quality, integrated education for all! To provide real access to higher education, we call for open admissions and free tuition with a state-paid living stipend for students, and an end to the racist “tracking” system in the high schools.

The SYC seeks the mobilization of the social power of the multiracial working class against racist provocations. We fight against any illusions in the capitalist state (or the campus administration) that perpetuates the status quo, and for the forging of a multiracial, revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system of racism and war root and branch.