No Administration Reprisals! Cops Off Campus!

Defend San Francisco State Professor Akom!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below, edited for publication, a March 27 statement issued by the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club on the case of San Francisco State University (SFSU) professor Antwi Akom.

The racism endemic to capitalist society, and the role of its repressive state apparatus and its lackeys in the university administration have been revealed yet again with the release of the results of the “independent investigation” into the cop attack on black Ethnic Studies professor Antwi Akom last October. The investigation was organized by President Corrigan in the wake of campus protest following the arrest of Akom. He was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer after he was stopped by a security guard and campus cops while exiting his own office, while his young children waited in the car. As we wrote about the people heading the “investigation” team in November 2005 after Akom’s arrest:

“The Democratic Party figure Willie Brown is a black front man whose job is to make it easier to enforce segregation and oppression through brutal cop terror and economic marginalization in San Francisco’s poor black neighborhoods. Louise H. Renne is a hangman of the capitalist injustice system, the president of the Police Commission that oversees the San Francisco police and its ‘Office of Citizen Complaints,’ whose purpose is to whitewash the cops’ image.”

— “Hands Off Antwi Akom! Drop All Charges!” WV No. 859, 25 November 2005

As we predicted, the investigation commission did just that, denying any racial bias on the part of the cops and actually accusing Akom of being the aggressor, manipulating the evidence to support their witchhunt.

On March 17, S.F. District Attorney Kamala Harris dropped the criminal charges against Professor Akom, but the threat against him is far from over. The administration could still fire him or suspend him without pay, or demote him. Campus unions should come out in defense of Akom. The administration and the state’s targeting of Akom is a threat against all black students, workers and the faculty on campus. An injury to one is an injury to all! Hands off Akom!

The Spartacus Youth Club has a tradition of defense of those targeted by the administration, like when the International Socialist Organization and Students Against War were sanctioned last year for protesting military recruiters. In 2004, when four female students from predominantly Muslim countries who defended themselves against the attacks of campus right-wingers were targeted by the administration and the FBI, we demanded: “No reprisals! Down with the right-wing witchhunt!” The current escalation of racist provocations and witchhunts against leftists and minorities across the country comes in the context of the phony “war on terror.” The “war on terror” is an all-sided attack against neocolonial countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran which is accompanied by a domestic war on blacks, immigrants, leftists and the working class.

On March 22, over 200 students and faculty rallied in support of Professor Akom and against the findings of the “independent investigation.” Many speakers expressed their outrage at the report, demanding an apology by Corrigan and a new investigation with student/faculty participation. While we add our voices to those opposing this racist outrage, we warn against illusions in the campus administration—the ruling class agents on college campuses—and oppose schemes for “community control” or supervision of the police, which have historically served to alibi the inherent racism of the capitalist state. The role of the cops on campus is the same as their role on the streets—subjugation through terror. SYCers at the rally held signs that read “No Administration Reprisals Against Prof. Akom!” and “Cops and Military Recruiters Off Campus!” We call to abolish the administration! The universities should be run by the students, teachers and workers who study and work there!

Decades after the end of the civil rights movement, higher education is still out of reach for many minority youth, and blacks in particular. The rising cost of tuition and the gutting of affirmative action are a racist purge of higher education. The attack against Akom is not an aberration, rather it is the logic of the capitalist system that views black people as a “surplus population” who belong in prison or serving as cannon fodder for the wars of U.S. imperialism, not at an institution of higher learning. The SYC fights for free, quality education for all! For open admissions and no tuition!

The Spartacus Youth Club looks to the working class as the only social force with the power and interest to smash the capitalist system of exploitation and eliminate the racism it produces once and for all. Just as it took the Civil War to smash slavery, nothing short of an overturn of the capitalist system will succeed in destroying the economic base of black oppression. We advance a program of revolutionary integrationism, seeking to mobilize the power of the labor movement to fight against all instances of racist oppression, while understanding that to eliminate black oppression will require a socialist revolution. To accomplish this requires breaking the chains that bind labor to the Democratic Party of war and racism and forging a revolutionary workers party. The Spartacus Youth Club fights to win youth to the perspective of building such a party. Hands off Antwi Akom! Cops off campus! For black liberation through socialist revolution!