Lynch Rope Provocation at UC San Diego

Down With the Racist Purge of the Universities!

(Young Spartacus pages)

In the last two months, black students at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have been subjected to a barrage of racist provocations. In February, the UCSD PIKE fraternity sponsored a “Compton Cookout” mocking Black History Month and promising guests a taste of “life in the ghetto.” Partygoers were urged to dress as ghetto stereotypes and promised there would be chicken, watermelon and malt liquor. Then angry black students were grotesquely denounced on UCSD Student Run Television as “ungrateful n----rs.” When Black Student Union (BSU) members made a search of the studio for the tape, now missing, they found instead a cardboard sign reading “Compton Lynching.” This outrage was followed by the hanging of a lynch rope, the symbol of Ku Klux Klan murderous race terror, from a campus library light fixture.

An Afghan student who saw the hanging noose correctly concluded, “I just took that noose as an attack on all of us.” Other UC students spoke of immigrant-bashing “border parties” that require attendees to hop a fence to gain admittance. That this was defended as just good fun reflects the pervasiveness of racist reaction. Meanwhile, the head of the UCSD College Republicans, who absurdly denounced UCSD as an “extreme leftist” school, announced that “subsequent protests could deepen racial separation.” This is the old Jim Crow logic, where it’s not the racists but those who protest against racist treatment who are portrayed as threatening the racial “harmony” of a society founded on the bedrock of black oppression. Historically, every struggle for black equality has raised the spectre of communism.

In that vein, Governor Schwarzenegger, an admirer of the racist border vigilante Minutemen, went out of his way to condemn eleven students who were arrested protesting in defense of the besieged Palestinians at an appearance of the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine in early February. The “Governator” obscenely equated them with UC San Diego racists and swastika-carving vandals of UC Davis. We say: Hands off the Irvine 11! Defend the Palestinians!

The campus racists have been emboldened by the attacks of the capitalist rulers, both Democrats and Republicans, on the measures even minimally addressing discrimination against black youth. The elimination of affirmative action programs across the country, together with skyrocketing tuition and fee costs, has meant a racist purge of black students from the universities. In 1996, California Proposition 209 banned affirmative action programs and slashed financial aid and remedial and counseling programs, with the result that today black students represent only 3.8 percent of the student body in the University of California system! In the context of the current economic crisis, funding for public education has been cut to the bone in California, with programs closed, fees hiked and teachers laid off. Freshman class size at the California State Universities and community colleges, where there was proportionally higher black and minority enrollment, has been slashed, restricting access to education even further for working people and the poor.

The racist provocations sparked protests and occupations at UC San Diego and other UC campuses in the weeks leading up to the March 4 “Strike and Day of Action to Defend Public Education” called to protest cuts, layoffs, fee hikes and the shrinking numbers of blacks and minority students on the campuses (see “Protests against Education Cuts and Fee Hikes Sweep California,” WV No. 950, 15 January). In California, the March 4 demonstrations brought out tens of thousands of university and high school students, as well as multiracial trade-union contingents of teachers and campus and public workers. But the demonstrations were organized on the basis of begging the bourgeois rulers to reorganize their priorities to benefit the oppressed. This comes down to pitting the workers and the oppressed against each other for crumbs from the capitalists—as shown when Schwarzenegger came out against any further cuts in funding for education, but instead chopped nearly half a billion dollars more in services for the poor, disabled and elderly in line-item vetoes!

Grotesquely playing into the capitalists’ divide-and-rule scheme, the chair of UCLA’s Afrikan Student Union demanded the firing of the UCSD library staff after the noose was found. Seeking to work together with the same administration overseeing the gutting of education and the purging of black and minority students, the UCSD BSU co-issued a “joint statement” with the campus administration for the March 4 Day of Action proclaiming, “The UC San Diego administration and students have engaged in a productive wide-ranging conversation about how our common goals can be reached...there is a commitment from all participants to work together.” The joint statement’s recommendations centered on funding BSU-supported programs “to promote diversity on campus.” In the context of the destruction of many of the gains of the civil rights movement, many liberal activists today have abandoned even talk of black equality in favor of the tokenistic rhetoric of “diversity.”

In an open letter posted on their Web site, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) extended an invitation to the UCSD BSU to join them begging on their knees to the Board of Regents to “follow California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s lead by stating as their position in the federal court that Proposition 209 is unconstitutional and discriminatory.” (Brown, a Democrat, is now running for governor.) Far from offering a perspective of struggle independent of the capitalists, BAMN and other liberals seek to channel the youthful fighters for black rights who are turning out for these protests into the dead end of reliance on the Democratic Party, the Supreme Court, the campus administration and other institutions of racist capitalist rule.

We defend affirmative action in university admissions because it has meant gains, however minimal, against the inherent race and class bias in higher education under capitalism. But, as we asserted against BAMN in an article written before the 2003 Supreme Court decision against the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program:

“The stark truth is that there is no way to overcome entrenched racial oppression within the framework of capitalism, in the universities or elsewhere. Affirmative action programs were set up as a sop to defuse social struggle and in order to create and co-opt a ‘talented tenth’ of black middle-class professionals. But these paltry, tokenistic efforts never made a dent in the deep-seated oppression of the black ghetto masses, whose condition has continued to deteriorate over the past few decades.”

— “Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!” WV No. 801, 11 April 2003

When it comes to the education of those they exploit, the capitalist rulers expend only what they need to maintain a minimally educated workforce. In the short term, the capitalists may give sops to head off social struggle, but under capitalism these reforms can be and usually are reversed. And if educating the sons and daughters of white workers has increasingly become an expendable overhead, the children of impoverished black people are increasingly deemed an expendable population by America’s rulers. Today the bourgeoisie questions “wasting money” to keep the black ghetto poor alive, much less educate them.

Full political, social and economic equality for the black masses requires a workers revolution to rip the economy out of the hands of the racist capitalist rulers and reorganize society on a socialist basis, where production is for human need, not profit. Only through the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression. The Spartacus Youth Club fights for workers rule, where everyone’s labor and talents will be needed to build a socialist world of abundance and equality, and where education for all will be a natural part of this collective labor. Join us in this fight!