Affirmative Action: By Any Means Neccesary! Spraul Plaza 3/8/01!

I personally have no first hand knowledge of anything that went on, but this letter was circulated among the listserv in the Department of Sociology at CAL. As the letter states, it was also sent to the editor of the Daily Cal. I do know the source to be a generally reliable person and a sincere advocate of affirmative action:

Dear Colleagues,

I've send the following to the Daily Cal as a letter to the editor.

I don't know if they will print it or not, but I wanted to share it with you.

Lynn

At 11: 30 am on March 8th a helicopter hovered above me as I was walked down Durant Avenue among a crowd of approximately 50 high school students,who were in town to attend the rally. Without warning, and without
provocation, one of the students attacked a young man who was sitting at a table outside the cheese steak shop.

Within a moment all was chaos. Shouts, screams, tables and chairs overturned, a head hitting the sidewalk. Students simultaneously crowed in and fled from the scene, while I stood paralyzed five feet away. After a lifetime, perhaps less than thirty seconds in real time, the original
perpetrator and his friends left. The victim stood up. The left side of his face and head were red, a young woman handed him his shoe. "I'm Ok, I'm Ok, I'm Ok", he said.

He was attacked because of his race.

I strongly support affirmative action policies and not only did I plan to attend the Rally and March, I also encouraged my students to attend. I gave my students information about the week's events and I canceled both of my Thursday sections.

At the rally, I set aside the violence I had just witnessed and focused on the speakers. The second speaker was a representative of BAMN's from the University of Michigan. He began his comments by mentioning that there had
been reports of windows being smashed on Telegraph Avenue. However instead of condemning this violence, his remarks were tantamount to an endorsement. He reminded us that at the sanitation workers march lead by Dr. Martin Luther King "Many windows were broken". However what the representative from BAMN failed to mention is that Dr. King, who condemned violence, did not endorse these actions. I was so offended and repulsed by his speech
that I left the rally early and did not attend the march.

In theory there may be a great distance between destruction of property and harm to human beings. However in reality, violence, once set into motion has a life of its own and the line between broken windows and broken heads is a thin one.

BAMN needs to endorse a position that explicitly condemns violence. A non-violent policy is required for moral, as well as, strategic reasons. Strategically, a non-violent policy can only help to broaden BAMN's base of support. More importantly however, by exercising moral leadership on this issue, BAMN can help to create an environment where the kind of violence I witnessed would simply be unthinkable.

Lynn Rivas
GSI for Sociology 101B

Later on, another speaker condemed those actions and made clear that that was not what the rally was about.