Wednesday, October 16, 1996
PROGRESS:
Affirmative action’s end puts gains made in ’60s in dangerBy
Victor Wolfenstein
In 1969 Angela Davis was hired to teach philosophy at UCLA. She
had yet to give her first fall semester lecture when an FBI
undercover agent publicized her membership in the Communist Party.
The Regents of the University of California reacted with alarm and
attempted to have her fired. Both students and faculty rallied
strongly to oppose this gross violation of Davis’ constitutional
rights.
In the months that followed, Davis, her family and friends were
subjected to unremitting harassment, including often violent
attacks from the police. Then, in August 1970, she was falsely
accused of aiding Jonathan Jackson in his disastrous attempt to
free his brother from prison. Arrested and herself imprisoned, she
was finally tried and found innocent in the spring of 1972. Her
only "crime," it became clear, was her passionate commitment to
social justice and political freedom for all people.
Here we are, a quarter of a century later. The fierce struggles
of that earlier period have long since subsided. And yet …
In March 1996, Regent Ward Connerly wrote an open letter to
Angela Davis, now a professor in the History of Consciousness
Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In it he
expressed his alarm at her opposition to the California Civil
Rights Initiative (now Proposition 209).
The letter reads, in part:
"As this state prepares to engage in one of the most sensitive
issues ever to confront us, namely the future of racial preferences
in California, the knowledge that you are part of the Feminist
Majority leadership to oppose CCRI should give all of us great
pause … As a Marxist ideologue, I suspect that you yearn for race
and gender warfare as much as you do for class warfare. The
continuation of policies that would Balkanize this nation, such as
racial and gender preferences, serve the end to which you seem
irreversibly committed.
"I will be urging all Californians to view with fear, concern,
and anxiety your role in the effort to defeat CCRI."
The Regents of the University of California and Angela Davis: in
this regard, at least, "the more things change, the more they stay
the same."
But, regrettably, things really have changed. Thanks to Connerly
and his political allies, affirmative action has come to an end at
the University of California. Anti-immigrant hysteria continues to
be legislatively enacted while, at the national level, the fragile
welfare net put in place during the 1930s has been systematically
torn apart. Disparities of wealth and income  the gap between
the rich and the poor  have grown alarmingly.
My point is not that the 1960s were the good old days and that
we have now fallen on hard times. Rather, I am attempting to
express a concern about the direction of social change. The
struggles of the 1960s were the culmination of a long forward
march, in which the liberties reserved for a privileged part of the
population were remarkably extended. The women’s suffrage movement
and the ratification of the XIX Amendment in 1920, the growth and
legitimation of the labor union movement during the 1930s, the
civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s  in each
instance progress was made in resolving the contradiction between
the universal principles of American political life and their only
partial realization in practice.
Now we are moving in the opposite direction. Although the
disenfranchisement of women and a return to legal segregation are
extremely unlikely, our public life is increasingly being driven by
the attitudes that underlay these archaic and unjust practices. And
this, in my opinion, gives meaning to the forthcoming vote on
proposition 209. Are we going to recommit ourselves to acting
affirmatively in protecting and expanding the rights of all
citizens, or are we going to let the democratic promise of American
life slip away?
If you think this is an important question, you might want to
drop by Bruin Plaza at noon this coming Friday, to hear what Angela
Davis has to say about it.