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A critique of race and affirmative
action on campus
Civil rights legend Julian
Bond speaks at UNCA
By Liz Allen
Feb. 6 (AGR)– Julian Bond is currently the Chairman of
the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
In the 60s and 70s he was involved in the civil rights movement, one
of the leaders in organizing sit – ins, freedom rides and voter
registration drives. In his speech at the University of North Carolina
– Asheville (UNCA) he described himself as an internationalist
opposed to the ideals of white supremacy, that are “enforced by
law and terror that began with slave capturing in Africa and continue
on through the present day.”
Bond was also a member of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee) and worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King. His talk
was entitled “Affirmative Action: The Just Spoils of a Righteous
War.” Affrimative action is giving preference to members of groups
that are under represented or at a social disadvantage.
Bond discussed the fallacy of the idea of the so–called “Good
ol’ Days,” and although a lot of gains have been made in terms
of race relations, especially through the decision in Brown vs. Education
in 1954 and with passage of the Civil Rights Act 1964 and Voting Rights
Acts of 1965, still there is a large amount of work left to be done
in terms of creating equality between the races.
“If there is more to be done then there is more to do it with.
Volunteering for social service does little to change the status quo;
that has to do with challenging power,” Bond explained.
After pointing out that Dr. King described war abroad as cheating people
at home and hurting the poorest the fastest, Bond criticized the Bush
administration for the war on Iraq and its infringement on civil liberties.
At one point Bond called attorney general John Ashcroft, J Edgar Ashcroft,
referencing J. Edgar Hoover’s attack on civil liberties when he
was in charge of the FBI. “When we fight a war for democracy then
democracy is usually the first to go,” Bond said.
He lamented a consequence of the Voting Rights Act as having the effect
of allowing politicians to “play the race card” and further
criticized the Bush administration for using National Security Advisor
Condolezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell as “human shields”
in claiming to be the most diverse administration, with the exception
of the Clinton Administration. However, Bond pointed out that recently
Rice, stated that race could be one factor among many others to consider
when deciding on the composition of a classroom.
“Affirmative action has been under attack, not because it has failed
but because it has succeed,” Bond said. Opponents of the program
try and say there is a stigma attached to receiving affirmative action.
To this he questioned if stigma is felt by the millions of white men,
who are known widely to have gotten jobs, a loan, into college, or presidency
because their father was in a position to help them.
Bond described the need for affirmative action as analogous to a clearly
unfair football game where the white team owns the goal posts and stadium,
and is in good with the announcers, fans and referees.
African Americans in the US have only been recognized before the law
as full citizens for 39 years, making affirmative action a rational
necessity in eliminating disparity between the races.
Dr. Dolly Jenkins–Mullen, professor of political science at UNCA,
as well as a member of the Asheville City Schools Board of Education,
called the idea that racial equality has been achieved in the past 39
years “a ridiculous assumption. That would be assuming that everyone
was on board for the whole 39 years and everybody went, ‘Ok we’re
going to run as fast and hard as we can,’ that’s unlikely.
We know that there are many folks who haven’t even started playing;
they have not begun any kind of affirmative action at all.
“In Asheville see how many people of color are working above the
lowest wage earners here, if you see them at all; really you don’t.
This town really has a lot to answer for. We are looking at folk who
are applying for jobs, and we don’t even think twice about saying
we are not hiring. The danger in that is that we’re used to it
now.”
Dr. Jenkins–Mullen said she agreed with Bond’s comments that
people outside of a negatively affected group often say race, ethnic,
or gender discrimination does not exist. To this she asked, “Well,
how would you know that if you are not part of the affected group? And
I could here easily say, well, I don’t think the Native Americans
suffer at all — I’m not Native American. I think Native Americans
would be better poised to assess their situations.”
More than just claiming to be an equal opportunity employer at the bottom
of a job application, Dr. Jenkins - Mullen advised employers to step
outside their comfort zone and away from the human tendency to hire
someone exactly like themselves.
Part of the Black Student’s Association (the campus organization
that brought Julian Bond to UNCA) Anushka Jagedeo pointed out that schools
aren’t allowed to use affirmative action anymore. “I feel
like there is a commitment among some people on this campus to making
this university more diverse: culturally, ethnically, racially. However,
there is a lot of apathy among students, faculty, staff, administration
and a lot of people are just tired. Unfortunately, that is making our
university look more and more white everyday. Even though the majority
of the population of the United States is white, 13 percent of the population
is Black, 13 percent of the population is Hispanic, and that is not
reflected in the numbers that we have at our school, and that frustrates
me. I’m tired as well. I feel like that this is the time to come
forward and say ‘There needs to be a change.’
“There is not a lot of support among the student population, so
it really just takes a small group of people, going forward to the chancellor,
the vice-chancellor, saying we are unhappy about what is going on. We
have to show them that if there is no diversity on campus, then there
is a lack in their education. You will go into classes and hear students
speak and you will not be hearing other sides of other issues around
them.
“Really it just has to be a core group of people who believes that
there needs to be change and going up to everybody asking for help and
asking that they listen and recognize that segregation ended years ago
and that we need to have more diversity within the college,” Jasedo
said.
Like many liberal arts colleges recently, diversity has become more
and more part of the language around campus. Chancellor Jim Mullen,
who introduced Bond and present at the reception and book signing held
after Bond’s talk (guarded by UNCA public safety officers). The
chancellor told the Asheville Global Report that the university had
made specific improvements in diversifying the university in the re-formulation
of the general education curriculum. “It’s called ‘integrated
liberal studies,’ and there’s a whole focus on diversity within
that, so every student who comes here will see a perspective of diversity.”
Also as some of the ways in which UNCA is committed to diversity, Chancellor
Mullen cited his work with the Director of Diversity and Multicultural
Affairs, Dr. Dwight Mullen (no relation), the daily attempt at re-doubling
efforts “to move in a very forward manner” towards diversity
and the Julian Bond program.
“I think we’re absolutely committed to the ideas [Bond] expressed
in the sense we’re committed to diversifying this campus, to be
sure that human dignity on this campus is respected and celebrated and
I think, very importantly we’re committed to the premise that our
students can make a difference. I think that what resonated through
his remarks that young people can make a difference and have an obligation
to try, and that’s what we try and teach here,” Chancellor
Mullen stated in the interview.
During the reception UNCA student Liam Luttrell–Rowland commented,
“I think people are very disappointed. I’ve met a lot of teachers
that defiantly want more diversity in their classroom, all the students
I know, almost all my friends want diversity in the classroom. The question
is whether the university is really going to make that happen or whether
they’re just using Julian Bond as a way to say ‘Oh, we’re
progressive.’ We were just talking about how we wished Julian Bond
had addressed our campus more directly or that someone had asked him
to.”
Minori Hinds, another UNCA student who was present, continued, “I
think it was ironic how we just told the chancellor that the one disappointment
that we had about the speech is that it didn’t address our campus
specifically, then he just gave a speech full of rhetoric about how
you guys are really gifted. That’s nice and everything but it seems
superficial and insincere. I’ve never talked to him in my life.
“I don’t feel like it’s diverse really, to be honest.
This is my first exposure to Southern Culture, going here, I grew up
in a bunch of different places including Japan and California, being
here makes me severely aware of the colossal problem that is a lack
of diversity … I feel like a freaking novelty walking around, like
please ask me questions because I’m a spokesperson for my ethnicity.”
She explained that having different types of people on campus was important
because, as a fact of life, people learn from differences.
Also involved in the conversation, Daniel Genidovick said that not being
confronted with race he felt ignorant of any issues, but said he has
never seen an African American in his classes and “I feel like
I’ve seen every minority on campus and I know them by face, and
it’s struck me how few there are.”
Questioning labor history
By David Moberg
A century ago, labor issues were at the heart of American politics.
How could American workers, increasingly employed by large corporations,
escape “wage slavery” and be assured of an “American
standard of living,” determined by morality and democratic politics
and not just by the employer-dominated labor market? How could the rights
of citizens be protected as the power of capital grew and workers toiled
under undemocratic conditions for large private corporations?
Historian Nelson Lichtenstein’s State of the Union superbly
surveys and analyzes how these dilemmas were temporarily resolved in
an unsatisfactory way in the middle of the 20th Century. Labor struggles
didn’t disappear entirely, but largely disappeared from public
debate—and have once again become as relevant as during the Progressive
Era, but with only a diminished labor movement weakly raising the issues.
Lichtenstein argues that progressive politics in America suffered as
concerns surrounding work were corralled into an increasingly ignored
ghetto of labor union activism. Now issues of workplace democracy are
likely to return to the national agenda only with a larger, stronger
and transformed union movement.
After the labor movement declined in the ’20s, a victim of employer
attacks and welfare capitalism schemes, it rebounded in the ’30s
with the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), leftist organizers
and spontaneous popular unrest.
The labor revival was aided by the New Deal and sympathetic politicians.
By raising wages and providing a social wage (including Social Security),
unions and the New Deal would increase consumer demand and help solve
the cause of the Depression. The New Deal version of “industrial
democracy,” Lichtenstein argues, was a kind of constitutionalism
largely embodied in the National Labor Relations Act. The industrial
union movement also increased political democracy, playing a critical
role in the expansion of citizenship rights for immigrants, blacks,
and, to a lesser extent, women.
With the New Deal support (and a “corporatist” regime of labor,
government, and business to maintain production during World War II),
the labor movement grew dramatically. It raised and began equalizing
wages (including the largely privatized social welfare program of “fringe
benefits”) and established a system of industrial justice focused
on seniority rights and methods of processing individual grievances.
The old craft-oriented American Federation of Labor unions adopted many
of the CIO innovations of industrial justice and fringe benefits, but
as sociologists Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin emphasize in
their recent history of the CIO, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial
Unions, significant differences among the unions remained. Although
many critics suggest that communist union leaders were no better than
less radical unions in advancing workers’ interests, Stepan-Norris
and Zeitlin muster considerable evidence that the communist-led unions
were more democratic, protected workers’ power on the job by preserving
the right to strike or developing a steward system, and were as good
or better in delivering bread-and-butter gains and fighting for women
and black workers. Although “red” union leaders often resisted
the political machinations of Communist Party officials, they fell victim
to attack from the government, employers, and opponents in the labor
movement — and the movement suffered.
Many unionists and historians see in the post-World War II years an
emergence of a labor-management accord that accepted unions as social
institutions. Lichtenstein persuasively argues that this new regime
was not born of victory but of a dictate imposed by defeat—of unions
particularly and the left generally. After World War II, corporations
returned to union hostility, aided by white Southern Democrats who had
supported much of the New Deal but saw the new labor movement as a threat
to their racially segregated order. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, passed
by Congress over President Truman’s veto, undermined labor solidarity
and militancy and gave employers the right to openly oppose workers’
decisions to organize.
By the late ’50s, Lichtenstein argues, labor support fell further
as the nation’s political focus shifted from work to consumption
and leisure, the courts elevated management rights over unionist tenets
and corruption was exposed in key unions. In the ’60s the labor
movement under George Meany lost historic ties with liberals and intellectuals
as it was viewed as out of touch with the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Race increasingly replaced labor as the central concern of liberal politics—which
focused on remedies by the state and emphasized individual rights. Lichtenstein
argues that this new rights consciousness undermined unions. But if
American unions had been stronger and their leaders more progressive,
they could have used the new focus on rights to strengthen unions, for
example, winning a greater role for workers in enforcing occupational
safety or protecting employees from plant closings and capital flight.
Lichtenstein blames politics more than changing markets for the collapse
of the labor movement in the ’70s and ’80s, citing attacks
on construction and municipal unions as precursors of the more widely
recognized decimation of industrial unions. Likewise, he sees unions
as aiding their own demise by bargaining concession contracts and accepting
quality of work life programs that gave management the upper hand and
workers only the illusion of participation in solving problems on the
job. But he underestimates the significance of globalization. Indeed,
the broader fight, including work by unions against globalization policies,
has come closer than any phenomenon to putting the “labor question”
back into the center of American and global politics.
During the period of the postwar labor accord, union officials viewed
their responsibilities under collective bargaining partly as restraining
worker initiative and direct action. Staughton and Alice Lynd’s
The New Rank and File chronicles the experiences of workers—and
some union leaders, like former Steelworker local president Ed Mann—who
extol greater direct worker control of unions and workplace action.
Their book is unexpectedly complemented by Suzan Erem’s engaging
memoir of her work on the staff of Chicago Service Employees Local 73,
where leaders tried to organize more worker involvement in the union.
Erem’s account reveals much of the good and bad in unions made
up of overworked and fallible people—both staff and members.
The Lynds’ intriguing, multinational collection of interviews emphasizes
the possibilities for workers (and community allies) to organize themselves,
yet they acknowledge the role leadership can play in mobilizing workers
and making unions more democratic. Mann was a local union leader, for
example, but believed in direct action. “I believe we’ve got
too much contract,” he said, invoking the Industrial Workers of
the World attitude toward workplace disputes. “We’ll settle
these things as they arise.” In Erem’s account, the reformed
local union encourages greater membership power and participation (not
all of which is progressive, unfortunately). Although at times union
staff suppressed or supplanted workers’ actions, Erem also found
direct action to be a powerful way to enforce the contract.
So what has labor learned? In an excellent volume of reporting and analysis,
sociologist Dan Clawson argues that labor will grow in numbers and strength
not incrementally, but through one of its periodic “upsurges.”
He suggests this moment may be at hand. Clawson sees hope in new efforts
to organize women and to fuse labor organizing with the movements of
working-class communities, immigrants and minorities. He also praises
organizers’ efforts to challenge neoliberalism (which he cites
as the real issue, not globalization), and to fight for a living wage
and for corporate codes of conduct.
Clawson reports with perceptive detail about many of the recent and
ongoing campaigns — from the Stamford, Connecticut labor and community
organizing project to immigrant worker organizing strikes — that
he believes might give impetus to an upsurge. He believes labor alliances
with other movements will expand the meaning and ambition of the labor
movement.
It is striking how little attention, however, he gives to labor’s
political efforts, which by some measures have been its greatest organizational
success in recent years, even if few policy victories have followed.
Politics and government have played critical roles in past upsurges.
Besides urging unions to be more militant, Lichtenstein urges unions
to act more “as an independent, and sometimes as a disloyal, component
of the Democratic Party coalition.”
However, given the weak options for “disloyalty,” labor would
be better off working with other progressive movements—including
environmentalists, largely ignored in Clawson and Lichtenstein’s
prescriptions — to lead the Democratic Party to focus on the “labor
question” in a new, broad and inclusive fashion.
Democracy must extend beyond changes in the workplace to include greater
social control over investment and the kinds of goods and services American
companies produce—and even the kind of society Americans want.
Increasingly, Americans do not view themselves as citizens or workers,
but as consumers. This makes the task in some ways harder than a century
ago. But Americans still value democracy, and as these writers make
clear, union effectiveness and credibility relies on them being the
best examples possible of democracy in action.
Source: In These Times
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