The “affirmative action bake sale” on Friday, sponsored by the Young Americans for Liberty, was a misguided attempt to publicly display its opposition toward the consideration of race in admissions. A testament to its false perception of affirmative action was the pricing of the baked goods: $2.50 for Asian American students, $2 for Caucasians, $1.50 for Latinos, $1 for African American students and $0.50 for Native Americans.
Bruin Republicans, who originally sponsored the event but later withdrew its affiliation, released a statement on the original Facebook event page saying that the supposed intentions were to create dialogue among students. Young Americans for Liberty felt that its arbitrary, race-based prices equated to the reality of race-conscious admissions.
However, this fraudulent attempt to express a political stance merely exposed their ignorance on topics of socioeconomic status for minority populations, the inconsistencies of access to social, political and academic opportunities between the privileged and disadvantaged, and the misconception that affirmative action is solely based on race.
It is no secret that the majority of underprivileged and underrepresented communities – both on campus and across the country – are Black or Latino. Within the confines of this institution of higher learning, the community disparities are too drastic to ignore. For example, in fall 2012, the total undergraduate enrollment for black students at UCLA was 801 students, or only 2.9 percent of the 27,941 total enrolled students.
Moreover, of the 5,621 students in the class of 2016, only 2 percent, or roughly 113 students, are black. Regardless of Young Americans for Liberty’s arguments, these numbers don’t lie. Only 74 percent of black students graduate from UCLA, one of the lowest graduation rates among high-ranking institutions. These statistics predict that only 84 black Bruins will graduate in 2016.
When a university has more NCAA national championships (109) than graduating black males, we as a university, state and society have wholly failed.
Young Americans for Liberty fails to realize that not everyone on this campus has experienced privilege similarly and that each individual has a unique story laden with distinct opportunities and disadvantages.
A leading myth perpetuated by fear and racism is that with affirmative action comes a quota system: The incoming first-year class must have X amount of Latino students, for example. Rather, affirmative action seeks to compare students of similar academic performance on the basis of their life stories and the hurdles they’ve faced, many of which are byproducts of the color of their skin.
A ban on affirmative action is a ban on consideration of race, sex, national origin, ethnicity or color. Quite simply, it’s a ban on one’s identity. All students’ true experience on this campus is jeopardized when we deny students of color. Everyone on this campus, including faculty and staff, benefit from the stories, culture and experiences that students of color share.
Furthermore, our culture of mass imprisonment, similar to the ban on affirmative action, quite literally locks students of color out of and away from our university. With unprecedented resources spent on building prison facilities, codifying oppressive policies and criminalizing California youth, most of which are young boys of color, the state has given clear signal that it prioritizes incarceration over education. Whereas the ratio of Whites to Blacks in California is nearly nine to one, Blacks are incarcerated at nearly double the rate of their white counterparts.
IGNITE, or Invest in Graduations, Not Incarcerations; Transform Education, a campaign of the University of California Student Association, aims to end this perpetual cycle by dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and instead replacing it with a diversity pipeline. By advocating for pieces of legislation that support reentry and rehabilitation; restrict school expulsion policies, which favor students of color; and seek to overturn Proposition 209, IGNITE seeks to redress the ever-present problem of California’s institutionalized racism.
The more youth are criminalized, the less of a chance they have at reaching the university. Race-conscious admissions processes recognize this injustice, amongst many others, and simply level the playing field. Young Americans for Liberty, in trivializing and manipulating the facts of affirmative action, were unable to capture the reality of California’s unspoken racism that funnels students of color into prison cells, not classrooms and libraries.
To deny students of color is to deny history, diversity and culture. We must break from California’s misaligned priorities that lead to community inequity and realize that it is time to put students first.
Stokes is a third-year Afro-American studies student and a student researcher at UCLA’s Black Male Institute.