Last week’s visit to Cal State Long Beach by Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist held the potential to ignite into a volatile racial incident.
CSULB’s highest echelon remains silent about the event and its peaceful, albeit noisy, student-faculty rejection. Administrative silence on crisis issues can send loud messages. When leaders hide their heads in the sand, it signals complacency and apathy about important community issues.
Racial tensions nearly peaked at Cal State Fullerton when orange nooses were hung at an anti-hate rally on Nov. 7. Unlike CSULB’s top brass, which is still hushed about the hate mongering brought to our campus, CSF’s administration almost immediately sent a campuswide e-mail denouncing the provocation as racist.
Robert L. Palmer, CSF’s vice president of Student Affairs, held a press conference proclaiming, “Fullerton takes very seriously any act of prejudice, uncivil behavior or hatred toward others in our community,” as reported in the Associated Press. Palmer publicly denounced the display.
Four nooses were discovered in a classroom at Central Michigan University on Monday and one was placed on a black professor’s door at Columbia earlier this year. The now-infamous noose-hanging incident in Jena, La., (not Alabama as reported in another campus paper) sparked racial fury, violent protest and a march on Washington, D.C on Friday.
Similar psychological assaults have been occurring frequently at universities across the nation and should be prosecuted as hate crimes.
CSULB’s foremost leaders might at least address concerns that a small student organization persists on inviting inappropriate guests, with the sole intent to intimidate and bully minorities, Latinas/os being the MMP and Conservative Student Union’s victims du jour.
The CSU is not bringing valuable dialogue to CSULB in the manner of noteworthy conservative information, education or conversation. The small group is trying to increase its membership by bringing fringe elements and caustic events to our campus to instigate and inflame already sensitive passions.
The CSU plans to bring Ted Hayes, already shown on TV news reports physically attacking peaceful demonstrators, on Thursday, Nov. 29. Hayes has publicly solicited gang members to join his group. His visit, with returning consort Gilchrist, is potentially a riot in the making.
The CSU is promoting “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” in December, as reported in the Daily Forty-Niner. Jason Aula, the group’s president, announced a “game,” where “A group of people will line up dressed as illegal immigrants and throw dodgeballs at a group of people dressed as border patrol agents.”
How do illegal immigrants dress?
The offensive nature of the planned event shows the CSU is deliberately concocting a recipe for disaster. Targeting anybody with the grade-school equivalent of symbolic bullying sends only messages of hatred and ethnocentricity. Human dignity is not a game.
It’s highly symbolic to children of people without papers who attend our university. AB 540 students are among the intended targets of the CSU. It’s difficult enough for them to live under a cloud of intimidation at The Beach. Now, they’re being threatened by outside factions called here by fellow students.
This is detrimental to their pursuit of higher education and better opportunity. They can’t openly chase their dreams for fear that racists will track them down on campus. This is not only a civil rights violation, but is a moral assault on human dignity, as well.
Our own Vice President of Student Affairs Doug Robinson should be commended for his support and high visibility during Gilchrist’s visit. Student Life & Development, University Police and the Long Beach Police Department were exemplary in controlling the event. True leadership was displayed on all of their parts.
Rather than let already seething student tensions rise to a level that could have gotten out of hand in a hurry, student leaders and faculty took it upon themselves to form an ad hoc Campus Coalition Against Hate to let cooler heads prevail.
Multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and traditionally underrepresented groups came together to stand as one. While they should be proud of their conduct, it shows a lack of concern for student safety that CSULB’s community figureheads have kept mum.
We encourage free speech and defend the First Amendment. In fact, the First Amendment was practiced. As well as the right to free speech, the Bill of Rights guarantees the right not to listen. Most students decided not to listen to Gilchrist or his entourage.
The CSU and its supporters have bombarded our Forty-Niner e-mail accounts with harassing messages. They have sent what should be considered threatening e-mails to popular professors Victor Rodriguez and Norma Chinchilla for spearheading the CCAH.
CSULB should send a clear message to the CSU and pull the official charter from this “gang of 10.” If anything screams for academic discipline, it’s the hate-filled activities this group is bringing on campus.
Instead of sitting on their hands with deafening silence, CSULB President F. King Alexander or Provost Karen Gould should put their fingers to the keyboard and their voices to the microphone to support their constituency. They must let it be known that our community won’t tolerate ignorant intolerance against any humans, especially minorities.
Truly effective leaders don’t hide in times of turmoil. They step forward and lead.
Silence is not always golden.
