Elias Enciso  Enciso is a
political science and Chicana/o studies student. He currently
serves as the Internal Vice President of USAC. Â Â
When I stepped onto this campus three years ago, I had a huge
culture shock. There seemed to be so few people with which I could
identify. I was expecting to find the campus overflowing with
people I considered to be truly intelligent and socially talented;
people who not only are book smart but street smart, have mad
player skills, are multi-cultured or at least bilingual, have
acquired the ability to think outside of the box, and possess a
sense of social responsibility.
Much to my disillusion, I found two men claiming to be
Christians carrying signs warning the campus of God’s hate
for anything outside of the traditional white American patriarchal
society. In the midst of a desperate yearning for a safe space I
was fortunate enough to have met some of the students working in
Kerckhoff Hall, where many student organizations and student
government offices are located. At Kerckhoff, I found many
community leaders who were putting their time and energy into the
struggle to improve the socio-political situation of aggrieved
communities on and off campus.
I became involved with a student group named La Familia, a queer
Latina/o organization. I was excited to meet folks that understood
my struggles and had a clear sense of what it is like to grow up in
a state that has a painfully long history of channeling people of
color into the most poverty-ravaged sectors of housing and public
education.
For two hours each week I meet with other members of La Familia
to organize and strategize on how to help our community get into
institutions of higher learning and out from underneath the boots
and batons of the LAPD. Other times, it was really dope because we
came together just to give love and support to one another. We kick
it and put it down at whichever club we hit up.
After all, it’s crucial to be with people who are
conscious of the discrimination and oppression ever so present and
obvious to people like oneself. It is difficult to maintain a
positive state of mind when one is constantly surrounded with only
people who do not see how they are racist, sexist, classist,
homophobic, xenophobic, and/or heterosexist.
In class, an event transpired that proved to me that the SAT and
whatever criteria UCLA uses for its admission process is partially
or wholly incompetent. I heard a student in a course section say,
“I think self-love can be as divisive as hate for other
groups.” This student could not understand why everyone had
to be so conscious of race all the time and he felt that everyone
was always trying to “push” his/her culture and
politics on everyone else.
I suspect this dude was referring to all the student of color
organizations and the work/programming done by these student
groups. I also suspect he was absolutely clueless about the deeply
embedded cultural stereotypes and structural inequalities that
plague people of color, women and queers. He had obviously been
miseducated, blinding his consciousness to the dire need for
cultural representation and self-affirmation.
As a matter of fact, this young man, like many, cannot
understand or accept the reality and advantages that a white racial
identity allows him to enjoy. Such privileges range from
psychological wages, such as the ability to walk into an affluent
neighborhood or a retail store without instantly garnering
suspicion, to the ensured opportunity to accumulate assets through
inter-generational transfers of wealth that have been procured in
part by a political system that legally denied communities of color
access to the same opportunities whites had.
Discriminatory federal housing policies, racist home loan
agents, and Jim Crow laws are recent examples of the structural and
social inequalities people of color have faced; slavery, manifest
destiny ideology, and the violent and forceful annexation of the
southwest are earlier examples of how American policy has worked to
slaughter people of color and take their wealth and property.
Because this student’s identity was not the target of 38
brutal murders since the death of Matthew Shepard, and because his
identity is not the target of a rising prison-industrial-complex
that has seen the building of 21 prisons in the state of
California, he is unable to appreciate the work students from these
respective organizations on this campus have done in getting UCLA
to adopt a hate crimes policy that can work to protect all students
on this campus.
The work done by students of color and progressive white
students on this campus, and campuses coast to coast, includes
actively participating in many of the social movements that have
brought about much needed change. These movements include the Civil
Rights Movements of the 1960s, the Farm Worker Movement, the
antiwar demonstrations of the early ’70s, and the
anti-globalization movement that has been calling out global
corporations such as Nike to hold them accountable for the
exploitation of workers everywhere.
Student of color organizations have created a space for
communities to voice our concerns and take a stand against the
issues that continue to tear our communities apart. Proposition
after proposition, and injustice after injustice ““ we
continue to fight one after the other. The UC Board of
Regents’ decisions SP-1 and -2 and the end of affirmative
action played on the neo-conservative rhetoric of a “color
blind” society.
Gov. Pete Wilson claimed that it was unjust to give hand-outs to
students of color when in fact, affirmative action adds race and
ethnicity as simply another factor to consider for admissions (much
like extra-curricular activities and sports), a concession that
clearly appears paltry when one considers all the privileges people
of color and women continue to be deprived of. Even after the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 ended de jure (by law) segregation, it certainly
did not end de facto (by fact). The end of affirmative action has
cut enrollment of blacks and Latina/os by 50 percent. More notably,
only 3 percent of the students admitted for Fall 2000 are African
American.
We must also never forget the fact that our communities are
being channeled into prisons instead of universities. Politicians
and corporations are investing heavily in the prison-industrial
system and have a vested interest in keeping people of color
incarcerated. After all, history does repeat itself. The prisons
have become the modern-day plantations and prisoners the modern-day
slaves, sometimes receiving as little as 25 cents per hour to make
the underwear we wear.
Student of color organizations provide spaces for students of
color to educate ourselves on such issues by maintaining
communities of strong practice. On this campus they have been the
organizations that have done the noblest work. From youth
conferences to the Student Initiated Outreach Programs, the work
done on this campus continues to understate our sense of social
responsibility. Anyone who attacks communities of color by saying
that these student organizations are unnecessary and cause racial
tension are mistaking the cause for the effect, have inept
analytical skills when it comes to assessing the socio-political
state that we are in and is also, as George Lipsitz puts it,
protecting the possessive investment in whiteness.
Let the millennium offer an opportunity for students to create
their own vision of society, one that involves integrity at its
finest and the ability to put personal privilege aside. Our vision
must accept the fact that our society, as it stands now, is not
“justice for all” and we must realize that we as
students can do so much more than go to class to change this
reality.