UC Berkeley Rally Condemns Racist Letter

More than 400 U.C. Berkeley students rallied on campus Wednesday to condemn a racist flyer distributed anonymously to minority students last weekend.

The letters, discovered Saturday morning in the mailboxes of 15 minority law students at Boalt Hall, denounced affirmative action and included derogatory racial slurs toward blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans.

“When I see you in class, it bugs the hell out of me because your (sic) taking the seat of someone qualified,” the unsigned flyers read.

It was the second such incident in two months at the law school, where 40% of the 950 students are minorities.

On Dec. 13, the first day of winter finals, several minority students received unsigned flyers announcing “Affirmative Action Sucks!!! Don’t Flunk Out!!!” and accompanied by a picture of a gorilla.

“The author of these hateful words seems to believe that persons of color do not belong at Boalt,” law school Dean Herma Hill Kay told the students Wednesday. “The author is wrong.”

After the December flyers were discovered, Kay issued a letter to students condemning the letter and held a meeting to discuss the issue. On Tuesday, she met again with 30 students and agreed to consider their request that a task force be formed to investigate the incidents and a dean for multicultural affairs appointed at the school.

The vituperative attack on affirmative action comes as the issue moves into the spotlight in political and academic circles up and down the state. Two California professors are circulating an initiative that would ban gender and race-based preferences in college admissions and hiring, and the state Legislature is considering a similar measure.

Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Education initiated an investigation of Boalt Hall’s admission policies based on complaints of reverse discrimination by conservative U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Los Alamitos). In response, the school agreed to conduct its own internal review and to stop separating applications from minorities and whites.

At Wednesday’s rally, UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien addressed the students and promised to “(take) all possible steps to determine who is responsible for the distribution of this material and . . . seek the strongest possible sanctions against them.”

Tien, who was born in Taiwan, told the students he could relate to the pain they felt. “I have personally experienced this, as you may know. As a graduate student, my professor referred to me as a ‘Chinaman’ and ridiculed my name,” he said. “When I moved to Berkeley it was impossible to rent an apartment.

“The issues surrounding (race) never go away,” he said. “They may remain at the surface for a period of time, but, inevitably it seems, the melting pot boils over. We are in one of those periods now. They seem to coincide with difficult economic times.”

Campus police have not determined whether the letters were written by a Boalt student, but students and administrators said they must have been distributed by someone familiar with the school’s mail routing system and class schedule.

“The Police Department is actively investigating,” said its chief, Victoria Harrison, “But we need students’ help.”

Minority students at the rally said the letters infuriated them. Some took the microphone to defend their presence on campus.

“African American students had the highest rate of (State Bar) passage of any roup at Boalt--and that includes white people,” said Dirk Tillotson, 25, an African American who is pursuing a law degree and a doctorate in jurisprudence and social policy.

Already, minority students and faculty at the school “feel like they walk around with a question mark over their heads,” said Nicole Wong, 26, an Asian American student who is graduating this spring.

“We have long known there is tension, and this made it very concrete,” she said. “It is just a symptom of a much larger sickness. . . . It creates an atmosphere which says racism is OK. The rally today says racism is not OK.”