Correction Appended
A group of students displayed fliers outlining the alleged
racism of conservative leaders throughout U.S. history and posters
portraying members of Bruin Republicans as Nazis at a table on
Bruin Walk on Monday.
The tabling was part of a campaign organized by a group of
undergraduate and graduate students in response to various programs
put on by BR as well as perceived racism on campus in general, said
Robert Nuengaye, a graduate student in psychology who helped
organize the display.
The students belonged to various groups on campus, such as the
African Student Union and MEChA, but maintain they were not acting
on behalf of the groups.
BR was specifically targeted for various programs it has put on
over the past few years.
In particular, students said they were offended by BR’s
campaign against MEChA during winter quarter and the affirmative
action bake sale last year ““ which sold goods to students at
different prices based on their race and gender.
BR launched a campaign against MEChA last quarter against what
it believes to be racist tenets in one of MEChA’s founding
documents. MEChA has maintained that its documents are not racist
and sees BR’s campaign as an attack.
The posters depicting two members of BR as Nazis was a direct
response to BR’s equations of MEChA’s ideology with
Nazism and was meant to reflect the history of the Republican
Party, said Catherine Sylvester, a fourth-year international
development and political science student who helped organize the
campaign.
“We can go back and look at history and state names and
people that are connected to the Nazi party … directly
connected,” Sylvester said.
Nuengaye, who drew the cartoons, said he made the pictures in
response to BR’s allegation that MEChA’s documents
contain a Nazi-like message.
Members of BR said they thought the cartoons were not only
offensive but “substance-less,” asserting that their
accusations of MEChA were completely different in nature than those
being made against BR.
“We never made any individual members Nazis; we never
actually called MEChA Nazis. … We just said that there were
similarities between the Plan de Aztlan (MEChA’s founding
document) and Nazism,” said Christopher Moritz, a member of
BR who was shown as a Nazi in a cartoon.
BR was targeted in particular, but Nuengaye said he experiences
racism from the general student body on a daily basis.
One purpose of the campaign was to highlight the
disproportionately low number of underrepresented students at UCLA
and the discomfort that some minority students experience, said
Justin Kastenbaum, a graduate student in education who participated
in planning the event.
Many students are simply unaware of the increasingly dire
situation for minority enrollment at UCLA, Kastenbaum said.
“It’s not only reactive, it’s
proactive,” Kastenbaum said. “It’s more of an
educational campaign than anything else.”
But not everyone perceived the tabling as an educational event.
Matt Knee, who was also depicted as a Nazi in one of the cartoons,
said the presentation was “just name-calling and ridiculously
silly assertions.”
BR plans to respond but has not yet planned how to do so, Moritz
said.
The tabling will continue for the rest of the week, and
Kastenbaum said the campaign would continue indefinitely, until
there is “some kind of change.”
Correction: MEChA’s founding document is
El Plan de Santa Barbara.