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Workshop Talks
April 2001
Affirmative action on job and campus
by Htun Lin
On March 8 I attended a teach-in and rally to reverse the ban on
affirmative action at the University of California-Berkeley campus. Over 3,000 students
participated, many from high schools from all over the Bay Area. There were
huge contingents of high school students bused in from West Oakland, East
Oakland, and San Francisco Hunters' Point--predominantly Black, Latino, and
Asian student districts.
School bureaucrats from both sides of the bay chided the students as well
as their teachers for attending a "political rally instead of doing
curriculum." Many of these bureaucrats, like new Oakland School
Superintendent Chaconas, are uncomfortable with students taking up a real
life curriculum which includes one's overall concrete future and not just
academics.
The demand for affirmative action came out of the much broader Civil Rights
Movement. Affirmative action as a government concession to the movement
started with the "Great Society" under President Johnson and expanded under
President Nixon. Even before the Vietnam War took off, some of the youth
who went to Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, such as Mario Savio (a
student at this very campus), began to ask what the fundamental nature and
purpose of an education was. He went so far as to declare that sometimes
you have to put your body on the grinding wheels in the machinery of this
rotten system to stop it.
He saw the existing educational system as part of that overall machinery of
destruction and exploitation, because the university is "a factory to a
large extent...it has its manager...and employees, the faculty...and raw
materials, that's us... That is the issue. Arbitrary power, alienation, the
managers and the managed...after a while the people get tired of being
treated, you know, by managers, as managed."
As a healthcare worker, the question for me about affirmative action is
whether it means a new way of being managed from above or does it mean
workers and students managing their own lives. At Kaiser Hospitals where I
work the AFL-CIO, our health workers union, and Kaiser management marketed
a top-down "partnership" to us by promoting more service-worker type jobs
for more minorities.
They sold out striking nurses who rejected management's restructuring cuts
in staff and patient care, as well as hospital and ER closures, which were
hurting predominantly poor and minority communities. But, that didn't stop
our union from posturing as an "advocate" for the predominantly minority
service workers.
It's not enough to simply demand more job positions or more college
admissions or seats at Boalt Law School or, worse, to be simply "equal" on
a par with our white counterparts, while staying within the limits of a
narrow vision of abstract "equality" within the present bounds of
exploitative production relations.
When youth begin to challenge the whole educational establishment whose
ideology is to treat students as mere raw material for the job market,
youth activity also challenges the alienated job world of capitalism, where
workers are treated as mere raw material for commodity production and
capital's accumulation and expansion.
In fact, even before the teach-in was finished, students had already begun
to gather around the GAP and Foot Locker stores, two well known chains of
overpriced commodities produced by sweatshop labor in impoverished
countries. Some students began to leave those stores with goods in hand.
Soon enough, the Berkeley police arrived in full riot gear, even though no
riot took place. The corporate media then predictably dubbed the teach-in
event as "marred by rioting and looting by Black teenagers."
Some adult organizers managing the event adopted this stereotypically
cynical view and even said "this is embarrassing...this teach-in is not
about this." This attitude fails to see that the youth by their very bold
actions step outside of capitalism's rules of commodity exchange.
A similar divide between the leaders and those who are led, between the
managers and those managed, also exists in the workplace. When we
rank-and-file workers actively enforce a strong picket line, management
will call in the cops to prevent "violence" against their property.
That's why we workers feel an affinity with students educating themselves
about the whole society and the way it functions, because they are
beginning to ask just what kind of education do we really want, and to what
ends, and what kinds of jobs do we really want, and to whose benefit? These
questions will not be answered when we limit ourselves to only fighting for
more of what the other side is keeping from us, be it college admissions or
wages and benefits.
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