As the California population has grown more ethnically diverse, the privatization of the public sphere has been sold to the electorate through a seemingly endless parade of racist bogeymen: immigration, affirmative action, bilingual education.
For children of immigrant parents, for immigrants themselves, for the first to attend college in their families regardless of their ethnicity, skyrocketing fees and cuts occur at a time when we can least afford it. We have been told that the real responsibility for the current crisis of education lies elsewhere: in Sacramento, in a larger economic crisis not caused by Wall Street speculators and bailed out investment banks but somehow by minority communities themselves.
We are told to divert our attention toward our legislators and away from the extreme bureaucratic waste and disastrous internal budgetary priorities of university administrators. We are told to write yet another petition by leaders who simply ignored the minimal demands of the 9/24 walkout and numerous alternative budget proposals.
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While fee raises and cuts have disproportionately affected communities of color, we have once again been told that the responsibility for this lies elsewhere. Demands for racial justice and equality are assumed to be incidental or “niche” issues which do not affect “the average student” or “the average worker.”
For decades the UC administration has attempted to isolate the most “diverse” constituency on campus: the service workers. As some of the most courageous and outspoken critics of current university policies, these workers have the most to lose and continue to demonstrate the astonishing power of collective action.
Routinely used as exhibits of victimization and vulnerability, students of color are often viewed as passive and frightened objects rather than radical political subjects who have a crucial role to play in transforming a broken institution.
Shared culture is no guarantee of political solidarity. And so we stand together with all those who are working to build a democratic mass movement powerful enough to challenge the twisted logic of privatization which makes structural racism routine. Neither students nor workers can accomplish this task alone. Current UC leaders are counting on the fact that we remain isolated from each other.
As formerly insulated middle-class communities face economic upheaval and “fear of falling,” they experience what most underrepresented working class communities of color have confronted for quite some time: systematic underinvestment, hyperexploitation and structural barriers to equality written off as individual failure or cultural pathology.