White Fraternity Students Hold Racist Party in ‘Honor’ of Black History Month
This was written by D’Artagnan Scorza, the Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute.
African American students at UC San Diego were shocked and demoralized by a “Compton Cookout” that took place this past Monday February 15.
According to the Facebook invitation, students from several fraternities organized this party in honor of Black History Month, inviting guests to “experience the various elements of life in the ghetto.”
Males were encouraged to wear oversized clothing, chains, and display tattoos. As “ghetto chicks,” females were “to speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger.” They were also supposed to imitate other so-called characteristics of “ghetto chicks” such as having a limited vocabulary, using vulgarities, and smacking their lips.
After protests from the Black Student Union and African American students on campus, on the evening of February 18, 2010, several students broke into the university-funded television station SR-TV in support of the Compton cookout, calling the African American community “ungrateful niggers.” Upon investigation of the program host’s media offices, the campus discovered a note on the studio floor with the words “Compton lynching.”
The students involved with the initial event are currently planning a “Compton Cookout Part Deux” in March. This is in defiance of the frustration of African Americans and other underrepresented students of color.
These events have caused UCSD to earn the reputation of being a racist school and is a blow to recruitment efforts for Black students and other underrepresented minorities to the UCSD campus. Currently, UCSD’s African American student body comprises 2% of the total population, despite a much larger presence statewide. Our tax dollars are supporting an institution that has a reputation for tolerating such offensive behavior against Black students.
Responses
UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox issued a statement condemning the initial event as did the Associated Students (AS) organization. In addition, several hundred students have led protests on the UCSD campus. Fox agreed to a list of demands on the part of students and members of the community including the creation of a task force to improve the university climate for underrepresented students and launched an investigation into criminal activity and violations of the Student Code of Conduct.
What Is Needed
We need to raise awareness and apply pressure to the entire University system. As unfortunate as this circumstance is, it is not isolated to just one campus. Campuses such as UCLA, UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz have faced similar problems in the past.
These types of events occur in part because of the small numbers of students of color. Without a critical mass of people of color, White students feel emboldened to allow their most base racist views manifest itself into incidents such as the “Compton Cookout.”
Organizers ask that letters of support and expressions of disapproval be directed to the UCSD Chancellor, Marye Anne Fox at University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093 and to the UC Board of Regents at University of California 111 Franklin Street Oakland, California 94607.
Furthermore, you can support the students by attending any sponsored event both on and off the campus. Finally, you can call on UCSD to explore disciplinary actions against perpetrators of hate and intolerance.
Dying While Black: An Examination of Race and the California Death Penalty
Photo by nodeathpenalty.org
The foundation of the Equal Justice Society is based on the premise that racial justice cannot be achieved when the law fails to reflect actual experience. Under existing equal protection law, the constricted “Intent Doctrine” (as established in the 1976 United States Supreme Court decision Washington v. Davis) ignores much of what we know about the dynamics of modern day discrimination and therefore deprives underrepresented groups access to our courts and redress for discrimination.
By requiring plaintiffs to prove a decision-maker’s conscious intent to discriminate, they are faced with an almost impossible burden.
Our focus on the Intent Doctrine intersected with the efforts of journalist Claire Cooper, formerly of the Sacramento Bee, to draw attention to the structural causes of the vast over-representation by Blacks on death row to a degree virtually unmatched in the nation.
We share Claire’s thoughts below:
In late 2008, I was asked to participate in a panel discussion on race and the California death penalty. What I learned in preparing for my remarks surprised me, though I had covered the state’s death penalty for almost 30 years as a newspaper reporter. Because this information has not been part of our death penalty debate, it may surprise you, too.
I learned, in sum, that blacks in this progressive state are over-represented on death row to a degree virtually unmatched in the nation. Death sentence rates for black defendants here (but not Latinos) far exceed black population rates and even black homicide arrest rates. I also learned that neither race-of-victim information nor any other available data seem sufficient to explain the wide disparities.
Please take a few minutes to read my Sacramento Bee commentary, “Scales of justice may weigh heavily against blacks.” Share with us your reactions and suggestions here. If you are in California, please consider how we might bring the issues to the attention of the state’s policy-makers. If you are outside California, please consider whether hidden racial issues are affecting the death penalty in your state.
My own view is that California should be collecting data on the way discretion is exercised in charging, prosecuting and defending homicide cases, as well as data on the racial composition of death penalty juries. But please share your understanding of the situation. Tell us how we can raise awareness of it and begin to fix it.
- Claire Cooper
EJS has examined the intersection of the doctrine and the death penalty before.
In August 2004, more than 60 people from the Bay Area legal and social science communities gathered for an EJS brown bag to discuss how we can use social science research to advocate for social justice and challenge existing legal frameworks
At the gathering, we discussed how the death penalty — in this case, at the federal level — and race is a good example of an arena with a high potential for frame-breaking.
There have been many cases where the Supreme Court ruled that racial disparities in the way the death penalty is administered are not that important even though in the last 30 years data show that there is a much greater likelihood that Black Americans will be sentenced to death in homicide cases (if and when the victim is white).
The U.S. Supreme Court has chosen to ignore data showing racial patterns, and has instead insisted on an individual case-by-case assessment of fairness.
In the fall of 2005, following the Katrina disaster, EJS began working with a coalition of more than 140 U.S. social justice groups in an effort to focus international attention on human rights violations in the United States. EJS focused on race discrimination and the impact of the intent doctrine on civil rights litigation, and other groups dealt with issues ranging from voting rights to environmental racism and the death penalty.
NABJ Statement on Future of Journalism Senate Hearing
Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, today issued this statement:
On Wednesday, a panel of digital and traditional journalism industry experts testified at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and Internet Hearing on “The Future of Journalism” about the challenges and successes facing online news aggregators and newspapers today.
The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) has worked on behalf of newspaper journalists for more than thirty years, yet many of our most talented members are rapidly becoming unemployed or leaving the profession out of necessity.
The intellectual property of journalists must be preserved, and NABJ supports any effort that seeks to afford news agencies a greater capacity to retain and compensate black investigative reporters, editors and other journalists while respecting the growth of digital journalism.
NABJ Board Member Charles Robinson, who attended the hearing, told Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) after the hearing that diversity needs to be a part of the overall discussion and a more diverse panel should be part of future discussions. Robinson also told the Senators that NABJ was available to help draft a diversity component of any future legislation affecting the newspaper industry.
The recently released 2009 ASNE newsroom diversity census is disconcerting for revealing that black journalists are losing their jobs at a greater rate than any other ethnic group, but it is especially disturbing that minority ownership or representation in newspapers was not a topic at Wednesday’s discussion.
Of the five panelists, there were no black representatives and only one minority. It is disgraceful that a discussion on Capitol Hill about the future of newspapers can happen without doing more to incorporate the perspectives of America’s increasingly diverse population.
NABJ will continue to work with news agencies, publishers, editors and others to promote diversity and affirm that our members are offered cutting edge training to keep them ahead of the curve.
At the same time, we call on our nation’s leaders to open their eyes to the communities that surround them and ensure that black media representatives have a seat at the table as new legislation is discussed.
RaceWire: Addressing Obama’s Racial Coding, plus Lakoff, Mike Lux
Tammy Johnson on racewire.com talks about her concerns over the use of racially coded language in President Obama’s address to Congress earlier this week. Her post has additional comments in addition to the video.
It’s interesting to take Tammy’s analysis and compare it to George Lakoff’s pre-speech assessment of the “Obama Code,” his definition of how the President tends to “express his moral vision indirectly” – “connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the ‘cognitive unconscious,’ ” and utilizes “seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves.”
Mike Lux also weighs in on The Speech saying that the President’s address could not have been a clearer call for what Mike identifies as the “Big Change Moment” in his new book “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.”
NY Post Editorial Cartoon: Simian Stereotypes and Cartoonist Excuses
If nothing else, the now-infamous New York Post cartoon by Sean Delonas published Wednesday showing a chimp shot to death by police officers should be a clear answer to the question of whether we’re in a “post-racial” America.
As EJS President Eva Paterson and others have argued, the answer to that question is a resounding “no.”
In a piece published Wednesday, Cal psychology professor Phillip Atiba Goff states that persistent simian stereotypes tagged to blacks are not mere small and unimportant post-racial leftovers of the “bad old days,” but significant psychological mechanisms of discrimination.
“It is tempting to … downplay the significance of ‘isolated events’ of bigotry and ‘armless words or pictures.’ But precisely because the dream of post-raciality is seductive for so many, it is all the more important that we not forget that cartoons like the one in today’s New York Post are never isolated-and consequently, never harmless,” he writes.
Asian America Must Battle Injustice with President Obama
I originally wrote this for ningin.com, a site covering Asian media and pop culture.
A Black man born in Hawai’i with an Asian sister was sworn into office Tuesday as our President. He took the oath of office on the same bible used by Abraham Lincoln for the exact same oath 148 years ago, realizing the dreams of countless African Americans and others who previously never imagined this moment.
President Barack Obama now leads our country into uncertain and troubled times. But he begins work on our nation’s ills with unprecedented numbers of Asian Americans in substantive roles in this Administration.
Japanese American Peter Rouse is White House Senior Adviser. Chinese American Chris Lu is Cabinet Secretary. Former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki is Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Nobel prize winner Steven Chu is Secretary of Energy.
We now have a First Family that includes Asian Americans. The President’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is half Indonesian. Her husband Konrad is Chinese American. Their daughter Suhaila is hapa.
This roster of Asian names is significant because the halls and backrooms of power in our nation’s capitol have for too long been dominated by monochromatic men. It does not mean we have arrived. It means we’ve only just begun.
Akonadi Foundation Launches Oscar Grant Peace and Racial Justice Fund
The Akonadi Foundation today announced the launch of the Oscar Grant Peace and Racial Justice Fund and the immediate availability of mini-grants of up to $500 to support the critical and emerging organizing, advocacy, and cultural work taking place.
On the first day of 2009, a white BART police officer shot and killed Oscar Grant, 22, as the young African American man lay on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back. While the officer has now been charged with murder, his arrest took place a full two weeks after the killing, following massive public outcry and an intervention by the state Attorney General. (For more information please go to http://joincape.blogspot.com).
In response to Oscar Grant’s killing, people all across Oakland, the Bay Area, and the country have come together to demand justice. This outpouring of collective action has been supported and guided by the experience, resources, and members of community organizations that have worked for years toward creating a world free of the structures of racism that oppress and brutalize people of color every day.
