Please take a look at this statement from the University of California and sign on if you are able to, especially with your institutional endorsement of this powerful statement:
 

If you would like to endorse this letter, please send your full name and  affiliation to UCantiracism@ yahoo.com .

• If you are faculty , please indicate your campus affiliation and position as well.
• Individual Signatures, please, then institutional/ organizational affiliation (Please spell out acronyms) .
• Signatures will be listed in order that they arrive.

Statement of Solidarity with African American and Palestinian Students in the UC System 

We strongly condemn the spurious connection made between despicable acts of anti-black racism at UCSD and on other campuses in the system, and the acts of civil disobedience of Palestinian and Muslim students protesting the speech of the Israel Ambassador at UC-Irvine on February 8, 2010. That this connection was made in a public communiqué sent by the President of the University of California and all ten Chancellors is deeply troubling. Please see the letter we are endorsing below. 

We believe that the conflation of these two incidents at the highest levels of the UC-administration is dangerous in what it reveals about the double standards with which this administration  addresses its own institutional policies around racism and community-based acts of racism. The use of the word “incivility” cannot mask this double standard. 

In that light, we ask that the Chancellors of UCR and UCI ensure that the Irvine and Riverside students who acted well within the ambit  “free speech,”  and who exercised their right to protest on February 8, 2010, not receive any further punitive, disciplinary action.  

Sanctions against these students will undermine  any efforts by UC-policy makers and administrators to bring about social and racial justice in the wake of these terrible events. 

They caused no threat or harm to the speaker or the audience. Indeed, they left the hall quietly after delivering their prepared remarks.  One may or may not agree that the charges are accurate, but the protesters certainly made no reference to the race of the speaker and were at no point anti-semitic in tone or content.  In this country, and on UC’s own campuses, effective public criticism of Israel has largely been hampered by political interests and orchestrated campaigns of opprobrium.  This situation leaves few avenues for protest of its actions or of the one-sided presentations of its representatives that would not be deemed disruptive. Indeed, it is almost always the case that events organized on campuses to present Palestinian viewpoints are required to include counter-speakers or are subject to strident and threatening criticism when they do not.  The current threat of draconian sanctions against these students, sanctions that have not been applied to those who have frequently disrupted Muslim speakers or pro-Palestinian speakers, and the imputation of guilt by association against the Muslim Student Union, suggest a remarkably biased application of disciplinary procedures. 

The incidents at UCSD, on the other hand, were expressly racist, directed at one racial group in terms that have historically been used to humiliate and discriminate against African Americans and deploying symbols that have been associated with the worst and most terrorizing racial violence.  That these acts of explicit and intimidating racism were met only with a teach-in on racism until student action forced suspension of only the student responsible for the most egregious act, the hanging of a noose, speaks directly to the unbalanced application of disciplinary procedures. 

The UC’s unequal response to these and other incidents at the UC campuses sends a very strong message to students and the wider community.  It suggests that racism against African American and Muslim students is tolerable, a mere breach of courtesy, while political protest of a state that has been condemned by impartial observers for war crimes and practices amounting to apartheid is unacceptable and subject to the severest sanctions.  One has only to recall President Yudof’s public condemnation of a panel of experts on Israel’s assault on Gaza held at UCLA in January 2009 to recognize that such double standards are deeply ingrained in the attitudes of UC’s administration.

The racist incidents at UC San Diego took place on a campus where the enrolment of African American students has declined to 1.3% of the student body and in a state-wide university where the total number of African American students amounts to a mere 3.34%.  These numbers are not accidental, but arise from a long-standing failure on the part of the administration to engage in desegregation of California’s higher education.  The replacement of the language of desegregation with “affirmative action” and then “excellence and diversity” has consistently sent the message that it is normal for white students to be at the UCs, whereas Black and Latino students must be there by special permission.  The language of “ungrateful n—-s” merely vocalizes in a more explicit and ugly way the attitude that is in fact materialized in the UCs admissions policies.  In face of such facts, the attempt to confront such acts of racist intimidation with an appeal to the civilized “principles and values of this University” becomes risible. 

By the same token, the imputation that protest against the state of Israel, which maintains a highly segregated society and which has placed all possible obstacles in the way of Palestinian education, is tantamount to anti-semitism constitutes no less a double standard. The accusation pretends to promote tolerance but in fact discriminates against the feelings, opinions and right to expression not only of Muslim students but equally of many who are outraged by the actions of a state and do not conflate them with an ethnic or religious group.  That the Muslim Student Union at UCI is coming under sustained attack both from within and from without the university again merely vocalizes a set of prejudices that the UC’s own administrative actions and statements implicitly endorse.

We condemn this double standard on the part of the administration of the UC system.  Rather than condemn a handful of students on the prejudicial grounds of “incivility”, the UC’s administration must face up to its own delinquencies on the matter of racial justice and equal access to higher education.

The University of California as a whole must be held accountable as an institution in whose academic cultures of racism is erupting precisely because it has not adequately responded to calls for racial and social justice.