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Conference
Calls for Affirmative Action
By
Jessica Lum
Contribution Writer
The Daily Californian
Friday,
April 7, 2006
In
response to the approaching ten-year anniversary of the passage
of anti-affirmative-action legislation, four Boalt Hall School
of Law journals hosted "Overturning 209: A Joint Symposium
& Movement" yesterday.
The
symposium's goal was to educate and mobilize students to reinstate
affirmative action by the 2008 elections, after it was eliminated
in California in November 1996 with the passing of Proposition
209.
"I
consider it to be a mirror of the civil rights movement. It will
really start when students organize and mobilize," said Seema
Patel, symposium coordinator and member of the Asian American
Law Journal.
The
symposium was the culmination of "Overturning 209 Week"
where panelists and guest speakers evaluated what they said was
the diminished status of minority groups not only at Boalt Hall,
but in the state as a whole.
The
Asian American Law Journal, Berkeley Journal of African-American
Law and Policy, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice,
and the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal began organizing the symposium
last fall and hope to take the movement to a statewide level,
Patel said.
Organizers
said they were surprised at the magnitude of the response to the
symposium, which garnered an estimated registration of 250, drawing
students from UCLA and the University of Michigan, where similar
anti-affirmative action legislation passed in 1997.
"This
is a huge amount of people to have at the beginning of an initiative
process. I think something very positive is going to happen,"
said Boalt alumna and keynote speaker Eva Paterson, founder and
president of the Equal Justice Society, a San Francisco-based
advocacy group.
In
an unprecedented move, other Boalt student organizations agreed
not to schedule conflicting events with the symposium, Patel said.
"The
moratorium on events in Boalt is the first time (it has happened).
It shows how much solidarity there is in the student body,"
Patel said.
Symposium
panelist Karen Clopton, CEO and general counsel of Workplace Consulting
Consortium, listed statistics that she argued showed the impact
of Proposition 209 in the decrease in ethnic minority lawyers.
"As
we criminalize African American men, and as we criminalize Latino
men, we have to think about the correlation between higher education
and enrollment decisions in graduate schools, like med schools
and law schools," Clopton said.
As
California's population has grown since 1996, analysts have often
overlooked that the same numbers of minority professionals now
represent lower percentages of the workforce, said Boalt alumnus
Guy Johnson, research associate for the Boalt-based Chief Justice
Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, at the
symposium.
Original
story online here:
http://www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=21769
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