RACISM WATCH : Zero Tolerance

Authorities and students at UC Berkeley are to be commended for their rapid and forceful condemnation of a racist flyer recently distributed on campus. Those who care about American society in general and its campuses in particular must spare no effort in fighting and denouncing racism whenever it appears. America’s policy toward such viciousness must be one of zero tolerance.

Alas, no one in this country or any other has figured out a way to win over the hearts and minds of shameless racists, so the next best thing is to identify racism and expose the racists as quickly and totally as possible. To this end, UC Berkeley, in many respects one of the nation’s most culturally diverse campuses, has launched a probe into who produced the flyers, which attacked affirmative action programs with crude and vile anti-minority epithets, and who put them in the mailboxes of 15 minority students at the Boalt Hall Law School. University Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien denounced the act, and hundreds of outraged and concerned Berkeley students rallied on campus.

The chancellor, a native of Taiwan, addressed the incident in moving, personal terms, drawing on his own bitter experiences with racism as a student years ago, and speaking forcefully about this recurrent evil. “The issues surrounding (race) never go away,” he told students at an anti-racism rally. “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.”