Wednesday, April 8, 1998
Prop. 209 threatens return to pre-Civil Rights thinking
209: UC admissions indicate problems are deeply rooted in
society
By Anatoli Ilyashov
It should come to no one’s surprise in California that race and
ethnicity are dirty words, so much so that prospective students
applying for admission to the University of California are not
voluntarily declaring their ethnic or racial backgrounds.
Since Proposition 209 eliminated affirmative action (in terms of
hiring and student admissions) in the UC system, both ethnicity and
race are dirty words, but oddly for a different reason than one
would expect. Now it is OK to pretend these words do not exist
because there is no benefit to declaring one’s race or ethnic
background. The university structure, administration and faculty
will now either discriminate in school if one is a minority or
discriminate out of a sense of guilt by admissions and employment
officers if they are white.
The law no longer helps as well. With affirmative action and the
1964 Civil Rights Act now in jeopardy, a cloud hangs over the heads
of all people.
The situation is not only paradoxical and tragic, but surreal.
It turns the clock backward when it should be going forward for the
next generation. An obviously confused or duly compensated African
American regent declares affirmative action to be unconstitutional
and proceeds to engage in double-speak, calling equal opportunity a
form of preference. President Reagan, who may have started the ball
rolling more than 20 years ago as governor of California, is now
being hailed as a great visionary leader.
The African American community is appalled and angered, but
remains stoic in its handling of this matter so far. Latinos are
equally trashed and basically not part of the mainstream. Asian
Americans are holding their own and are particularly quiet – that
is, if they too are trying to make it like the rest.
All others are watching or are just plain scared. There is no
unified student activism on campus against this proposition. Having
been screened as desirable for success in academics, most seem
docile and feel that it is a privilege, not a right, to attend
classes and graduate with a degree.
The ethnic tensions are submerged so far, but waiting for a
future time when a deluge of pitting one minority against another
occurs again. People with disabilities as a minority, or 20 percent
of the American population, are staying put for now, but feeling
the heat of discrimination either directly or indirectly because of
Proposition 209. Progressive faculty and administrators say they
will quietly ignore Proposition 209, but they know, nonetheless,
that it is open license to discriminate against minorities in
education. So, they also unconsciously start discriminating.
A veritable powder keg, if not the Twilight Zone in
disguise.
As a result, California’s most competitive and prestigious
public universities are having steep declines in admissions of
Latino and African American applicants for next fall’s freshman
class.
While racial or discriminatory attitudes were kept below the
surface before Proposition 209, they are now overt. The UC system
has become more white, more elitist, more homogenized in middle
class values, less directed to critical thinking on the part of
students and faculty, more focussed on unquestioned vocational
goals and less interesting from the point of view of a student
wanting diversity of thought and content. Students feel cheated
because of this lack of diversity, and faculty feel disgruntled and
out of the picture, as if floating in some kind of secure
retirement home with tenure at the college. Irrelevance and
complicity are also killing them.
It is a hostile environment for minority students from diverse
cultural backgrounds, who ironically are the trend for the American
mosaic. Because of this unequal change to get started on the road
to success through education, they are going to the "back of the
bus" again. It does not bode well for the rest of us, in terms of
stability, crime, and future outbreaks of violence and urban riots.
It discredits California, as well as the United States as a whole,
for being the "land of the free" that no longer is the place where
everyone has an equal chance to get somewhere on their own.
We may be in a worse mess than before the Civil Rights movement
in the ’50 and ’60s.