Newswire: Paying lip service to equality
By Lee A. DanielsSpecial to the NNPA from thedefendersonline.com
The equality-loving – so they say – College Republican club at the University of California at Berkeley recently held what they described as a satirical “bake sale” on the storied campus to publicize their opposition to any change in 15-year-old ban against state institutions adopting affirmative action policies.The publicity stunt – in which students were to be charged different prices for the pastry item, depending on their race, ethnicity and gender – drew several dozens supporters of the conservative group, and hundreds who protested it.  Ward Connerly, the former University of California Regent who led the campaign to pass the anti-affirmative action initiative, Proposition 209, sat at the club’s table on the campus’ major outdoor forum, Sproul Plaza.The bake-sale tactic is a favorite, apparently, with collegiate conservative and Republican clubs around the country, because, they contend, the differential pricing shows that treating people differently on the basis of race, gender or ethnicity demonstrates their political ideals.  The Berkeley collegiate conservatives adhered to the general outlines of the formula –  white students were to be charged $2.00; Asian students, $1.50; Latino students, $1.00; African-American students, 75 cents; and Native American students, 25 cents. All women were to get a 25-cent discount. In fact, according to news report, students who bought the cupcakes largely paid whatever they wanted.Shawn Lewis, the club’s president, told a reporter, “The pricing structure is meant to be discriminatory. We’re hoping it will encourage people to think more carefully about a policy that judges people differently based on the color of their skin.”The viciousness of the stunt and the simplistic notions behind it would put any self-respecting second-grader to shame. But, in fact, that very inanity is essential to opposing affirmative action; for one has to pretend that whites are being “victimized” by Blacks and Latinos. In other words, one must forget that many of the forces that were created in the past to maroon Blacks in a small corner of American life continue to have a tremendous impact in the present.In that regard, then, the College Republicans’ bake sale does have a substantial educational value. It reminds us how strong the lure of an old American tradition – the tradition of exclusion – remains, even as the American population itself grows more and more diverse.It shows us that bigotry, whether within or outside the groves of academe, remains impervious to logic. It warns us that some in the society consider opportunity a zero-sum game: more opportunity for all means less privilege for them. And it underscores the fact that some use the rhetoric of tolerance and meritocratic achievement to mask their opposition to any measures that would advance equality of opportunity.These people have a distorted commitment to fair treatment: It’s only exercised when they think whites aren’t being treated fairly.  If that’s not true, why, then, are their voices not heard protesting the fact that: *The Black unemployment rate at every level from high school dropouts to holders of advanced degrees is twice that of whites;*the overall economic decline of Blacks and Latinos over the past decade has considerably widened the gap in wealth and income between them and whites;*Despite recent reforms, the laws governing sentencing for cocaine possession and sale still result in harsher sentences for Blacks and Latinos compared to whites;*The so-called get-tough disciplinary policies adopted by many school districts have resulted in sharply disproportionate suspensions of Black and Latino pupils compared to whites for similar kinds of offenses;*Defendants convicted of murder in capital-punishment trails are far more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white rather than Black; and*Residential racial segregation endures, trapping a substantial number of African Americans and Latino Americans in poverty in circumstances that produce and exacerbate significant health disparities between Blacks and whites.The list of the inequalities that exist – and have grown worse during this decade – between whites, on the one hand, and African Americans and Latino Americans is long and a danger to America’s future.  They stem primarily from the different – and invidious – treatment Blacks and Latinos endured from a voluminous number of laws, policies and customs that once ruled, and in some instances, still rule the public and private sector.But the College Republicans at Berkeley, and their older ideological confederates elsewhere, prefer eyes shut firmly against reality, to pretend it’s enough to proclaim a meaningless commitment to equality.  Their bake sale is just a more visible indication that what they really want is to have their cake and eat it, too.
Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Editor In Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com.