Beyond "Police Brutality": Racist State Violence and the University of California

By Dylan Rodríguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. This essay is published in the June 2012 issue of American Quarterly.

From UC Davis to UC Riverside, Global Outrage to Conspiracy of Silence

The events of November 18, 2011, at the University of California, Davis, bear the mark of a certain kind of American racial-political spectacle. An eruption of police violence on that afternoon—what most have named an act of “police brutality”—catalyzed a national and international response, focused on the vulnerable bodies of young white people engaged in an act of civil disobedience. (With due respect to the people of color who were also in the line of fire at Davis, my contention is that their bodies were not the ones with which the national and international response was primarily concerned, nor was their vulnerability centrally responsible for inciting this global outrage in the first place.) The political outcry was primarily fueled by the viral circulation of cell phone, Facebook, and YouTube videos depicting riot-geared police officers dousing the UC Davis Occupiers with caustic yellowish fluid (a widely published still image of which appears here as fig. 1 [editor's note: the above picture]). As this scene becomes momentarily enshrined in the political narratives of the U.S. Left as a reference point for exposing the repressive tendencies of a state (and university system) in crisis, it seems that the spectacle of UC Davis has been isolated from the historical context that has enabled it.

As a point of vital contrast, it is worth remarking that two months after the UC Davis pepper spray incident, on January 19, 2012, a far more massive and militarized display of police force/violence occurred at my home campus of UC Riverside, in which students were actually shot with “less than lethal” police pellets during protests of the UC Regents meeting. In the case of the Riverside campus, UC police were mobilized from every UC campus other than Davis and Merced, and were supplemented by officers from the City of Riverside Police Department and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Police helicopters periodically circled over the protest, and officers took what seemed to be sniper positions at strategic high points on campus buildings. The climate was thick with police presence, and the pageantry of political intimidation manifested a massive show of force against the students, faculty, staff, and ordinary people who populated crowd. This police demonstration starkly contrasted with the protest’s well-disciplined adherence to tactics of “nonviolence.” (By way of definition, I do not consider loud chants, intense and vitriolic rhetorics of protest, militant refusal to disperse an alleged “unlawful assembly” or sit-down blockades to constitute “violence”; further, even if one wishes to perform the academic gymnastics of labeling such activities as forms of discursive, symbolic, existential, and/or immanent violence, they are certainly not of a kind remotely comparable to the aforementioned marshaling of legitimated state violence.) For reasons I attempt to explain, we should not be surprised that UC Riverside’s scene of police repression—images of which are also easily accessible via e-mail listservs, YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and the like—has not attracted remotely the kind of attention and righteous reaction as the incident at UC Davis.

Rather than stagnate in the discourse of righteous outrage that is almost reflexively spurred by such events, it may be more useful to pose some hard questions: for example, is it possible that the entwined narratives of moral affront and institutional (university/police) accountability surrounding UC Davis and select other police spectacles—and which may largely exclude police violence in other places—are part of a broader, commonsense conspiracy of silence regarding the where/when/why (and not merely the how) of state violence, and racist state violence, writ large?

Beyond “Police Brutality”

We should be clear: the UC Davis police used caustic “nonlethal” spray on those student protestors because they could. The institutional entitlement to use such police force, however ill-advised it may seem in hindsight, is neither incidental nor ad hoc—it is systemic, legally supported, and absolutely normal. As we pass the twentieth anniversary of the acquittal of five Los Angeles Police Department officers in the street torture of Rodney King, it is urgent to once again examine how police violence shapes our everyday realities in different and contradictory ways.

(A note on the prevailing language: police brutality has become a vastly misused term. While the phrase intends to communicate a sharp criticism of state power that has presumably violated its own self-defined laws and regulations, it is often used to refer to violent police practices that are utterly, ritually sanctioned by law.)

The public response to the display of police violence at UC Davis has been predictably characterized by a combination of righteous outrage and institutional shaming, accompanied by somewhat more muted and unconvincing—though equally predictable—defenses of the UC Davis police department and chancellor. Two facts are not in question: first, the campus deployed an armed police force to squash a conventional act of civil disobedience that was, in the recent historical scheme of things, quite institutionally polite and undisruptive; second, that same armed police force was authorized to use nonlethal weapons on nonviolent student protestors. (We must also remember that the spraying of such chemicals has been widely known to cause death and permanent disability in many instances.)

What does remain in question, however, is how and why these facts are being translated into a liberal-progressive political reaction that seems to naturalize—that takes for granted and/or completely obscures—the fundamentally racial and racist structure of U.S. policing, an apparatus that finds its modern roots in slave patrols, U.S. colonial military outfits (in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere), Texas Rangers (killers of Apaches, Cherokees, and Comanches), and white citizens’ militias throughout the post–Civil War era North and South. In other words, is it possible that much of the critical response to the scene at UC Davis is actually condoning racist police violence rather than challenging it, and if so, what is enabling such critically minded people to do so?

Access for Whom? The Middle Class Access Plan (MCAP), Diversity, and Privatization

In December, UC Berkeley announced a "groundbreaking" financial aid program called the Middle Class Access Plan (MCAP), which Chancellor Birgeneau hailed in the press release as a means of "sustain[ing] and expand[ing] access across the socio-economic spectrum" in an era of incessant tuition hikes. The following analysis was written by Zach Williams and posted at the blog Good-In-Theory. A summary of all the data used in the writing of this post is available here.

Class Conflict and Racial Strife Across the UC and its Golden State

What could be wrong with increasing access? Even further, what could be wrong with increased access for the middle class, when it appears as if current policy has been pushing the middle class out of Berkeley?

But wait, who is the middle class? And how are we increasing access for them? And why are they being pushed out? And why does it matter -- that is, why is that the problem we’re throwing money at? Because there are plenty of problems at which to throw money ($10-12 million dollars worth of money, in fact). But Birgenau has chosen this one.

So what is the problem, exactly? A shrinking middle class population (likely chiefly white) at the UCs.

But why is that happening? Because the high tuition/high aid model has led to a split in the population of the UC, divided between low-income families (~36% earning under 50k/year at Berkeley) and high income families (~30% earning over 150k/year at Berkeley. Another 10% or so still fall under the Blue and Gold program, which caps out at 80k. The remaining band of 20-25% has been narrowing, and thus needs our help.

Why? Well, because apparently declining enrollment among ‘the middle class’ is inequitable.

Never mind that likely 80% of California children live in families earning under 80k/year, while over 40% of UC Berkeley students come from families earning over 100k/year.

You see, under-representation of the bottom 80% is normal -- it’s expected, even, along with over-representation of the top 10%. But decreasing enrollments for part of the top 20% of children in the state? That can’t be tolerated.

So we have to lure them back in. And don’t be fooled -- this is about nothing other than luring people back in. Sure, MCAP has a friendly face to the extent that it eases costs for already enrolled middle class students, but this program is not about a temporary spate of relief for enrolled ‘middle class’ students. MCAP is taking a long view of the strategic situation in which the UC finds itself. And that situation involves intense competition with the Ivy league and other top tier liberal arts colleges and research universities over elite students.

So who are the students UC can draw in? Well, they aren’t Asian students, who attend the UC at a rate much higher than any other group already. There may be a few other minority students -- ~2200 UC system wide who are accepted but elect to go elsewhere and have middling acceptance rates. But the bulk of those who UCB is now pursuing fall into 10k or so white students who are admitted, but do not accept, UC enrollment. These students are, proportionately, the least likely to both apply to the UC and to accept enrollment when admitted.

Where are they going? Comparable private colleges, of course. That’s why, nationally, the MCAP program is perceived as a first effort by elite public schools to compete with the Ivy league over the upper middle class -- and this gets precisely to the point. MCAP isn’t about Californians. It’s about Out of State (OOS) enrollments.

While UC Blue and Gold is restricted to California residents, MCAP is restricted to ‘domestic’ residents -- that is to say, residents of the United States. And what do non-Californian ‘domestic’ residents pay? Another 23k/year in tuition. That more than covers any pittances extended to California’s middle class.

What MCAP does is introduce further granularity into the price discrimination scheme run by the UC. UC Blue and Gold allowed for an attenuated rate of tuition for in-state students earning under 80k. But there’s no fidelity among out of state students, who don’t qualify for Blue and Gold, or other in-state inducements like Calgrants. So while a California family earning 80k/year may pay 0 tuition, receiving 12k in subsidy to the cost of attending the UC (priced at 32k total, 24k excepting the expected student contribution), an out of state family earning 80k has a 35k a year tuition bill, plus that 20k/year in cost of living expenses, with no relief in site.

But the UC doesn’t need 35k to break even. Berkeley, the most spendthrift of campuses, lays out 19k per student. That’s 12k in tuition dollars plus 7k in state funding. OOS tuition has to make up the 7k not covered by the state. The rest is pure profit. Every lump of OOS tuition delivers about 16k in profit.

By fixing cost of attendance at no more than 15% of income for the in-state portion of fees, the UC has committed to giving middle class families up to 12k in subsidies. For Californians, some of that would be covered by Cal Grants. For those who qualify for Blue and Gold, some of that would be covered by Pell Grants.

But for out of state students, it all comes from Berkeley’s institutional aid.

The MCAP program allows for previously unavailable granularity in pricing for OOS students. Now, instead of all OOS students being saddled with roughly 35k/year in tuition, they will pay anywhere from 23 to 35k/year in tuition (disregarding non need-based aid). This is to say that the chief function of MCAP is to further increase the ability of Berkeley to recruit relatively wealthy out of state students who are willing to pay a lot, or at the least take on a lot of debt, in order to attend the UC. OOS students, after all, accept admission to the UC at a lower rate than in-state students, so anything to pull in more of these cash cows is desirable.



The other side of this story is how this program speaks to the general structure of the UC’s funding model. MCAP clarifies how tuition, through Blue and Gold and MCAP combined, functions effectively like a tax rate. This is a tax rate expressly for the purpose of redistributing income -- all the recent tuition increases have consisted of a return-to-aid portion, which is to say a significant portion of all tuition increases has been devoted to mitigating the effect of those tuition increases for people with low income.

For families within California, this reflects how the failure of state policy has led to the UC replicating the functions of the state. Because the California public as a whole is not willing to pay taxes to support public education by popular mandate, the wealthy in California have been able to avoid subsidizing the accessibility of the UC.

Instead, the UC has taken advantage of high demand for its product and the loose climate in higher education funding (through Federal support and student loans) to transfer the burden of maintaining UC accessibility on to wealthy or debtor students who wish to attend the UC.

In this way, accessibility to a quality university system is now contingent upon the realized demand of the wealthy, and the indebted, for that university system. Quite simply, the UC’s public mission has been privatized. Private charity, in the form of OOS tuition and ever increasing in-state tuition for the relatively rich, maintains access for poor students.

In this way, the burden of maintaining the UC is being shifted to wealthy and/or debtor students by raising their ‘taxes’ with nearly yearly tuition hikes. The turn to increasing enrollment of OOS students, coupled with the middle class access plan, allows the granularity of this tax to extend across the most profitable segment of the UC’s population.

The failure of tax policy at the state level has led to taxation at the UC level. This shifts the tax burden in three ways. First, it shifts the burden from CA taxpayers to CA families with children, who are, on average, poorer than CA taxpayers (though the children who go to the UC are not). Second, it shifts the burden to out of state money. Third, it shifts the burden onto in-state and out-of-state student and family debt.

What this leaves behind is any focus on the demographics and issues of California as a whole. The UC remains disproportionately wealthy while Hispanic and Black students remain disproportionately absent.

The collapse in public support and the turn to privatized financing cannot be disentangled from the persistent and endemic racial disparities proper to the UC. Increasing state diversity and increasing UC privatization are not simply coincidental. Rather, the demographic shift in the college-aspiring population of California has accompanied a general increase in private responsibility for the cost of college.

The UC has been able to sustain this shift while still enrolling poor students by relying upon the contributions of out of state students and wealthy in-state students, as well as increasing the expectations of student and family contributions across the board for all students, regardless of income.

As state funding falls, this means that the UC’s continuing operation as an accessible university comes to depend more and more upon the private demand for an elite education of non-Californian students. Poor Californians are increasingly at the mercy of the largess of rich out-of-staters.

In this way the public mission of the university has come to depend upon the private wealth of the rich who choose to attend it, and as such the character of the UC, as a public university, depends upon its ability to cater to these students.

This is to say that the UC must cater to the desires of the rich (largely white) kids who keep it afloat rather than the poor (largely hispanic) ones who make up a growing portion of the state. And so national competitiveness with elite institutions trumps focus on the challenges faced by California’s youth. MCAP, rather than acting as a boon to California’s middle class, merely serves as another way of catering to the rest of the country’s elite students, by further incentivizing their attendance.

In this manner, the people and students of California are losing control over their University, as their University, and their ability to attend it, comes to depend more and more upon the choices of others.

Occupying Education: The Student Fight Against Austerity in California

[from the November/December 2011 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas; download the PDF version here]


(photo by Andrew Stern)

By Zachary Levenson

On November 18, University of California (UC), Davis police attempted to raid a student occupation on the campus. When a line of UC Davis students refused to move out of the way, Lieutenant John Pike covered their faces with military-grade pepper spray. He returned for a second round, making sure to coat everyone’s eyes and throats.

“When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood,” described Assistant Professor of English at UC Davis Nathan Brown.[1]

Within 24 hours, a video of the incident had gone viral on YouTube, and the media feigned outrage. UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi apologized for the incident, and UC president Mark Yudof announced a task force to address the police violence. UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau was also forced to apologize after campus police clubbed UC Berkeley students and faculty while they also nonviolently defended an encampment on their campus two weeks before.

This is hardly the first time that California students have faced brutal police repression in recent years. This sort of authorized police violence has been a constant feature of campus administrations’ response to students as they have continuously mobilized against the privatization of their public universities over the past two years.


***


Early in the morning of November 20, 2009, 43 students from the UC Berkeley occupied Wheeler Hall, the building with the most classrooms on campus. When police arrived a couple of hours before classes began for the day, they found the doors barricaded and a small contingent of supporters gathered outside. Within a few hours campus unions were picketing, and students and workers had surrounded the building, chanting in solidarity. By midday, the number of supporters outside Wheeler Hall had grown to over 2,000, now actively defending the occupation in an impassioned standoff with hundreds of riot cops sent in to enforce order. Hanging from a second floor window was a spray-painted banner reading, “32% HIKE, 1900 LAYOFFS,” and the word “CLASS,” circled with a line through it. Purportedly in response to state funding retrenchment, the UC Regents had approved a 32% tuition hike for UC students across the state the day before. Students were livid.

In fall 2009, across the state, students launched dozens of occupations, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and blockades against the tuition hike and austerity measures. The police responded with repression, using batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and even Tasers. During the Wheeler Hall occupation demonstrations, one student was shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet at point-blank range, another ended up in the hospital after her fingers were nearly amputated by a police baton, and dozens reported being beaten.

“Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops,” read a graduate student nearly two weeks later, standing atop a chair, at a forum organized by the UC student government in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Police Department (UCPD). “The privatization of the UC system and the impoverishment of student life, the UC administration’s conscious choice to shift its burden of debt onto the backs of its students—these can be maintained only by way of police batons, Tasers, barricades and pepper spray. These are two faces of the same thing.”[2]

When he finished reading the statement, the students rose to their feet and followed him out of the room.

De-Provincializing Police Violence: on the recent events at UC Davis

UC Riverside Dylan Rodriguez on "(historically white) university campuses as places of presumed innocence":

University of California, Davis police officer pepper spraying protesting students, November 18, 2011


I. Beyond “police brutality”...

We should be clear: the UC Davis police used caustic “nonlethal” spray on those student protestors because they could. The institutional entitlement to use such police force, however ill-advised it may seem in hindsight, is neither incidental nor ad hoc—it is systemic, legally supported, and absolutely normal. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the acquittal of five Los Angeles Police Department officers in the street torture of Rodney King, it is urgent to once again examine how police violence shapes our everyday realities in different and contradictory ways.

(A note on the prevailing language: “police brutality” has become a vastly misused term. While the phrase intends to communicate a sharp criticism of state power that has presumably violated its own self-defined laws and regulations, it is often used to refer to violent police practices that are utterly, ritually sanctioned by law.)

The public response to the display of police violence at UC Davis has been predictably characterized by a combination of righteous outrage and institutional shaming, accompanied by somewhat more muted and unconvincing—though equally predictable—defenses of the UC Davis police department and chancellor. Two facts are not in question: first, the campus deployed an armed police force to squash a conventional act of civil disobedience that was, in the recent historical scheme of things, quite institutionally polite and undisruptive; second, that same armed police force was authorized to use nonlethal weapons on nonviolent student protestors. (We must also remember that the spraying of such chemicals has been widely known to cause death in many instances.)

What does remain in question, however, is how and why these facts are being translated into a liberal-progressive political reaction that seems to naturalize—that takes for granted and/or completely obscures—the fundamentally racial and racist structure of US policing, which finds its modern roots in slave patrols, US colonial military outfits (in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere), Texas Rangers (killers of Apaches, Cherokees, and Comanches), and white citizens’ militias throughout the post-Civil War era North and South. In other words, is it possible that much of the critical response to the scene at UC Davis is actually condoning racist police violence rather than challenging it, and if so, what is enabling such critically-minded people to do so?


II. The liberal racial sensibility

The video evidence of police repression widely circulated from the UC Davis campus via YouTube (etc.) has quickly taken hold of a liberal racial sensibility that absolutely abhors “police brutality” when it is waged on peaceful and/or nonviolent student protestors. (Progressives, radicals, anarchists, and other leftists often share in this liberal racial sensibility despite their left-of-liberal self-identifications.) We must be willing to acknowledge that the political and moral indignation over such excessive displays of nonlethal state violence (that is, pepper spray rather than bullets) is quite openly amplified when such tactics are used on white students, in the space of historically white institutions (as of Fall 2010, Davis had more white students enrolled than any UC campus besides UCLA).

There is something structurally white supremacist about this very indignation: the political expressions of outrage and institutional shaming over the spectacle at UC Davis are fueled by an over-identification with (historically white) university campuses as places of presumed innocence, wherein enrolled and employed (white) bodies are also presumed to presume innocence. If we are to be honest in this moment, we must also recognize that many have only now been provoked into talking and thinking critically about the violence of the police because they are moved to defend the presumption of white bodily and spatial innocence, and are not necessarily concerned about police violence against those whose bodies (and the spaces they inhabit) are presumed guilty, or something close to it.


III. De-provincializing UC Davis

As the dust begins to settle from the spectacle and outrage surrounding the campus police’s use of chemical weapons on those students at UC Davis, it becomes ever more necessary to de-provincialize this form of state violence. By this, I mean something beyond the self-evident assertion that the acts of the UC Davis police and chancellor are “not isolated incidents”: the question is whether we adequately understand how they are not isolated incidents. The installation of militarized police forces on US college and university campuses—a practice several decades old—must be understood within the general social and historical context of domestic policing, and the specific policing imperative to engage in undisguised modalities of domestic racialized warfare, by way of wars on gangs, drugs, migrants, terror(ists), and so forth.

To de-provincialize the police violence at UC Davis is to take seriously the notion that the nonlethal (though no less repugnant) violence of those particular university-based police officers would have been impossible without the absolutely lethal and regular exercises of police violence in places (and on bodies) nowhere near that grassy campus quad. My more fundamental concern thus lies with the policed, human raw material that precedes and exceeds those pepper sprayed students at Davis.
Apolitically policed Black and Brown bodies—young and old, urban and rural, transgender, queer, and straight—are incapable of extracting anything remotely like the consensus of liberal outrage surrounding (and ultimately protecting) the openly political policing of white, able-bodied college youth. While all policing is fundamentally “political,” only a select few of its forms are addressed as such.

This political abyss, the one that allows for acute indignation to be reserved for the policing of those presumed racially innocent (white), reflects a political and spatial provincialism that some of us simply cannot afford to stomach, and which gets to the heart of a racial antagonism that structures major strains of many progressive, social-justice oriented struggles, including the domestic Occupy movement.

Despite the outpouring of righteous and anxious statements from university administrators and other public officials disavowing this allegedly isolated instance of excessive state violence, there was a reason why those riot-geared UC Davis officers—who had to know they were performing for the cameras—did not hesitate to (nonlethally) fire. It is not difficult to see that in the post-1960’s period, militarized police repression of actual and potential political disorder is as American as the atom bomb. However, what is too quickly taken for granted is that the primary places in which such police power is exercised are the very same that are least likely to send their young people to places like UC Davis, and which are the primary sites for which the state has trained its police to engage in domestic, low-intensity warfare by way of drug sweeps, no-knock warrants, street harassment, traffic stops, and justified use of (deadly) force. What is to be made of the UC Davis police action of November 18, 2011, once we understand that the foundation of those officers’ presumed right to violence is not in some failure of bureaucratic protocol, nor in the obvious evidence of poor administrative leadership, but instead derives from the generalized legal, political, and cultural mandate of the US policing apparatus to dispense force as it sees fit?

Whether or not the officers and administrators implicated in these latest exercises of campus police violence are kept on the job, we can be certain that they will not face legal or criminal sanction, a fact that is so broadly and preemptively assumed that any possibility to the contrary is almost never mentioned in public discourse. The insulation of policing from the very criminal legal apparatus that it supposedly serves (and many would contend that the relation of service is the other way around) is what constitutes the operational premise for such exercises of state violence. It is this relation—and not the alleged excessiveness, illegality, or “brutality” of the police violence itself—that must be confronted if the goal is to be something more than just another piecemeal expression of localized shock and awe.

The diverse and complex practices of police violence are not only inseparable from the institutional evolution of policing in the last half-century, they are essential to the very institutional integrity and identity of the US police regime writ large. All of which begs a fundamental question: if the policing apparatus cannot be corrected, punished, or reformed against its own institutional entitlement to exercise violence more or less at will, in accordance with the law, and “within policy”—that is, if the solution is not simply to get the cops to “do their jobs better,” since in most everyday exercises of police violence (including fatal ones) they are generally affirmed as having done their jobs pretty damn well—then what political responses are available, and toward what ends?


IV. Yudof and Bratton: the case for (low-intensity) war

Now that University of California President Mark Yudof has called in domestic war expert and current LAPD Chief of Police William Bratton and his high-tech Kroll Security Group to conduct a “truthful and objective” (Bratton’s words) investigation of the mess at UC Davis, the lesson should be clear: the site of the (public) university is as much a focus of strategic state (and police) militarization and repressive mobilization as it is of budgetary “crisis” and de-funding.

Let us not forget that this is the same Bratton who pioneered “zero tolerance” (or “broken windows”) policing as a method to surveil, terrorize, and criminalize Black, Brown, and poor people in New York City throughout the 1990s. Bratton’s policing strategy during this period facilitated a dense climate of police harassment and violence against Black and Latino/a youth, based on often flimsy suspicion of such offenses as loitering, public noise, avoiding subway fees, and truancy. His name remains a Satan-like reference for the many who experienced (survived) the grip of his regime in NYC.

It was also Bratton who, as the Los Angeles police chief, endorsed a rather incredible 2007 study by the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Group that concluded that despite more than 300 official complaints filed by LA residents, LAPD officers had not once stopped, detained, questioned, or otherwise engaged a civilian as a result of their perceived racial identity (about 80% of these racial profiling complaints were dismissed out of hand by Internal Affairs as “unfounded”). This was the sixth consecutive year in which Bratton would proudly assert that there was not a single example of racially-based misconduct among his officers. Further, despite the explosive and recent revelations of the Ramparts Division scandal in the late-1990s, the videotaped police beating of disabled Black teenager Donovan Jackson near the beginning of Bratton’s first LAPD term in 2002, the now infamous 2007 police riot at the MacArthur Park immigrant rights rally, the rampant use of “gang injunctions” to detain, humiliate, and physically violate Black and Brown children and youth, and myriad other instances of police violence, it was the same Bratton who stated in 2008 that the LAPD “is not a racist department. It is not a homophobic department. It is not a brutal department.” (LA Times, April 30, 2008) In addition to all of this, it is also Bratton who has advocated hiring police officers from communities of color in order to magically make “policing more attractive to a changing population.” (The Guardian, August 13, 2011)

Without belaboring the point, the fact that Bratton has been hired by Yudof, will be paid with public funds to conduct the UC Davis investigation, and retains even a shred of credibility as an impartial or “objective” investigator of police violence/brutality is somewhere beyond absurd. It is no less than a pronouncement that the University of California is a place of toxic hostility for those who rationally (and self-defensively) view Bratton—and, for that matter, the police—as the diametric opposite of peace and security. Some would venture to say that Bratton’s entry is merely the crystallization of an institutionalized racial hostility that has aggressively inclined since the passing of Proposition 209 in 1996, which exterminated affirmative action initiatives, dramatically shifted the racial and socioeconomic demographics of the UC student body, and brought even more suspicion on those Black and Brown bodies walking across campus.

There is something else about the UC President’s hiring of Bratton and the Kroll Group that is worth considering. State and campus administrators seem to clearly understand that in the history of progressive, leftist, radical, and revolutionary social movements, university and college campuses worldwide have consistently played central roles as on-the-ground think tanks, centers of massive political mobilization, and major catalysts for the initiation, sustenance, and fulfillment of world-altering visions of political insurgency and social change. American apartheid was dismantled in significant part due to the political organizing undertaken by and with students, on and adjacent to college and university campuses. The recent emergence of the anti-prison industrial complex and prison abolitionist movement has been fueled by major public gatherings and consistent political actions at places like Columbia Law School, Laney College (Oakland, CA), and UC Berkeley. Recently, Occupy sites have sprouted up at colleges and universities all over the US, though perhaps most conspicuously on UC campuses (thanks to the UCD police). This history is further reason why the recent UC Davis police violence must be deprovincialized: because campus police and their administrators already view themselves within a global and historical context of managing, containing, co-opting, and repressing the potentially explosive and disordering political mobilizations that can happen just outside their office windows.

Allow me to briefly mention a recent development at my own place of work to illustrate the point in detail: on November 22, 2011, a mere four days after the pepper spray had cleared at Davis, the UC Riverside Office of Student Affairs, led by the Dean of Students, issued a declaration of “Protest Guidelines.” The document is framed by the affirmation, at once paternalistic and Orwellian, that “FREE SPEECH IS WELCOME HERE.” (All caps in the original.) It proceeds by providing a detailed protocol for “How to have a successful protest at UCR.”

What follows reads more like amateur political satire than serious university policy. First, the “CHECKLIST TO PLAN YOUR PROTEST” dictates that a registered UCR student organization or campus department must “sponsor your protest” at least a month before the event. Then, at least 2 weeks prior to the event, protest organizers must contact the Assistant Dean of Students and meet with an “Event Review Committee” that will “preview your preliminary plans.” In the meantime, potential protest organizers are put on notice that “protests with multiple risk factors, and/or an expected audience of over 100 will take more time to approve.” During the actual event, protestors are directed to appoint a “contact person” who will “consult with the Assistant Dean of Students or UCR designee throughout the event.” To top it off, this protest contact person and the Assistant Dean/UCR designee are instructed to “Exchange cell phone numbers.” (The entire document is available here: http://deanofstudents.ucr.edu/SiteCollectionDocuments/Policies_Procedures/protestguidelines.pdf)

Such are not simply small-minded rules conceived in the friendliest spirit of political intimidation (the consequences for not following the protocol are never mentioned in the document). We must recognize that they comprise a particular tactic within the framework of low-intensity domestic war. Implicit threats of student suspension and expulsion, faculty subjection to conduct and disciplinary procedures (via the Committee on Charges, to which a case against the author was brought and dismissed in 2002-2003), and police intervention hover over the UCR Protest Guidelines and similar campus protocols elsewhere. While none of this is to be confused with the worst of Bratton’s NYPD or LAPD, the UCR document’s criminalization of potential political disorder (“free speech” run amuck, without permission or approval) is not far from the police chief’s “zero tolerance” philosophy of social control.


V. If they’ll do that to them…

The galling ease with which the UC Davis cops sprayed those students—as if they were exterminators treating an ant infestation—is not best understood as primary evidence of mentally unstable, corrupt, or evil individual police officers who must be individually punished and held accountable for their actions. Rather, it is the very casualness of their violence that provides insight as to the historical depth and institutional reach of the late-20th and early 21st century US racist state. The bare fact that armed police officers at an elite public university can douse (white) students with clouds of pepper spray provokes some of us to translate that scene into a language of deeper alienation and terror: If the cops are willing to do that to white college kids, what are they willing—and probably eager—to do to us? Of course, the “us” cannot be homogenized here, because anyone remotely familiar with the history of racist US state violence recognizes that the police consistently deploy different strategies and intensities of force on different bodies, based on geographic location, racial profile, perceived gender and sexual identity, presumed non-citizen status, and so forth.

Nonetheless, the point should be clear: if we are to treat the UC Davis scenario as something more than an isolated incident of officers gone wild—and many students, activists, teachers, journalists, and other thinkers clearly wish to do so—we cannot help but come face-to-face with the enduring and complicated machinery of the racist state. If they’ll do this to upwardly mobile white people on a liberal Northern California college campus, what will they do to the rest of us, especially those whose guilt is more or less presumed in the eyes of the police as well as their recent critics?

-Dylan Rodriguez, UC Riverside

Race and Occupy Cal - A personal journal as the 'movement' heads to Berkeley

Cecil Brown Sat, 19 Nov at 7:40am

Original Post Here.

Occupy Sproul hoto by Rami Taibah, http://www.flickr.com/photos/22663008@N04/6355698267/in/photostream/

God could not have sent us a more fitting setting for Occupy Cal at the University of California, Berkeley, as the sun rising, yellow and warm. I was going devote today to observing and reporting on the social movement Occupy Cal.

Before I headed out on my jaunt, I phoned Ruben Elias Sanchez, a student organizer that I had met at the last Berkeley rally.

“Today, we are going to reconstruct the Occupation to focus on people of color,” he informed me.

Being a person of color, I was down with that.

“We are going to talk about Prop 13, how it put a cap on the amount that corporations have to pay.” I’m down with that too. “We are going to talk about getting rid of Prop 209, the affirmative action ban.” Now, I’m really down with that.

At the entrance of Barrows Hall, I see the chair of the African American Studies Charles Henry, and three of his colleagues, Sam Mchombo (who teaches Swahili), Ula Taylor, (who teaches American History) and Leigh Raiford (who teaches American Studies.) Raiford told me that she was going to give a Teach Out. There were going to be more than 20 Teach Outs, including George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Science, who was going to discuss framing public education and the Occupy Movement. At 8 p.m. that evening, Professor of Public Policy and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich would bring it all to a close with a speech honoring the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture.

With the African American Studies delegation, I marched down into the plaza, which was packed to the gills with people. Everybody was in a great and zesty mood, more like a rock concert than a political rally. I saw several people I knew. There was professor Linda Williams snapping pictures with her iPhone. There was the chair of the English Department, Sam Otter, in a suit, smiling. There was other distinct members of the faculty. My impression was that the powers that be wanted to be on the scene, because they agreed with the message that the university is fumbling the ball.

We had arrived on the Sproul steps and at that moment, soothing and ebullient gospel music caressed our eardrums and lifted our emotions high to the blue sky. People were chanting to the music of the University Gospel Choir singing social justice songs.

The leader of the choir was Rev. Doctor Mark Wilson, UC adjunct professor. A stout, energetic, hefty individual, Wilson, with his cap turned backwards and wearing a CAL T-shirt, was energetic and effective. He waved his invisible baton to his choir, which consisted of Cal students.

“Another day’s journey, and I'm glad 'bout it!” This traditional African American song fitted perfectly in with the optimistic mood. “Im so happy to be alive,” the choir sings, and we sang with them, about 1,500 of us. Indeed, with the music, and the sky, and the packed Sproul Plaza, the song captured the moment in time - a true zeitgeist.

Then, they sang a classic song from The Staples Singers, “Move Along.” The mood of the people was at its height when Rev. Wilson, turned to the keyboard player, an Asian with a long pony tail, and gestured for him to bring the chords up higher. And higher. And higher than that.

“I’m going to stand. I can’t bow to racism, injustice,” he said, leading the choir and the rest of us in his deep tenor voice, “I’m going to stand!”

The reverend did several songs that kept our spirits high. The last one was by the famous gospel composer Hezekiah Walker, “I Need You To Survive and You Need Me.” He had the audience turn to the next person and say these words, “I need you to survive!”

Each member of the audience turned to the person next to him and said, “I need you to survive.”

The input of the black gospel tradition, here administrated by an African American, set the tone for a movement that is fueled by black people and black concerns, even though nobody mentions it.

Before he was finished, Wilson invited Carol Walker, assistant at the financial aid and scholarship office at the UC to come up. Also, African American, she sang a beautiful song.

If Occupy Cal had ended right after this performance, it would have all been worth it. Even though, no one had mentioned race, it was obvious that blacks contributed a lot to the movement already.

I asked a few questions about the songs right after Wilson's performance.

“Most of them adapted well to the Occupation Movement. I started to change the word ‘racism’ to ‘capitalism’ to fit the theme. But then, I decided to leave it the way the Staples Sisters wrote it.”

Good choice.

Wilson, who is a Harvard graduate, said he wished that these students had been as enthusiastic 20 years ago when we were fighting for Proposition 209 that banned African Americans from the campus.

“They didn’t come out 20 years ago,” he told me. “When Amos Brown and others were fighting against anti-affirmative action.”

At the end of the gospel performance, Yvette Felarce took the mic. A member of the BAMN - By Any Means Necessary - she reminded the audience why the ban on Affirmative Action 209 must be dismantled. The audience was happy to listen to her and gave her a roaring response of hands and cheers.

Gradually, the rally broke up into groups. The Teach Outs began to form on various parts of Sproul Plaza.

Seated on a bench near the plaza, Professor Raiford lead a discussion on what she suggested as “the possibility of decolonizing and reclaiming space and funding within the university.” Traditional disciplines (like English, Rhetoric, History) dominate the funding still. Funding for minorities studies is still scarce and unavailable.

I wandered up the path from Sproul and found Michael Cohen, lecturer in American and African-American studies, under a tree, pacing the green grass as he expounded on the connection to the “Prison Industrial Complex” and “the Current Crisis.”

The prison complex in California spends more money on keeping young blacks locked up in San Quentin (where as it turns out, Professor Cohen teaches a class) than it does on Cal Students. He traced the history of this back to the '70s, when Ronald Reagan was elected to governor and then to the presidency. According to Cohen, there has been a policy by the state to keep blacks out of the classroom by putting them into prison.

As I left to check my car (ticket maids are particularly sneaky in Berkeley), I was accompanied by Zackery Manditch-Prottas, a white graduate student in the African American Studies department, who engaged me in an insightful commentary on the current state of hip-hop.

Next, I visited the American Studies group lead by Kathy Moran, the associate director, who sat with a small group of students. This group, like almost all of them, had no black students.

This, of course, was very disappointing. When I asked, Moran, why were there so few African American students or African American professors, she said, turning the palms of her hands upside down, no money.

I went looking for Professor George Lakoff’s Teach Out. A few days ago, I ran into him on campus walking with the aid of a cane. He had had back surgery and was recovering nicely. I walked with him to the elevator in Wheeler Hall.

“The problem with the Occupy movement,” he explained with a smile, “is that they don’t know how to frame their arguments.”

At around 3 p.m., the rally reunited into a march, exiting Telegraph at Bancroft, and headed west to Berkeley High School. After picking up an additional girth of students, it headed to the banks at downtown Berkeley.

As night fell, the students began to gather en masse around 8 p.m. to hear the long anticipated speech from Robert Reich.

For all of the anticipation, Reich’s speech was very short, about 15 minutes. In the first five minutes, he summarized what he took to be the students attitude towards Occupy movements.

“Some of you are here because you have a problem with the banks, but some of you are here because you have a problem with the university. But you are all here for a good reason. I am so proud to be a faculty member of the best university in the world.”

Big thunderous applauses. “When I was a boy,” he said, getting into something very personal - his height. “As a kid I was short,” he joked. He said kids use to bully him; and the audience sighed loudly. “The solution I had to prevent the bullies from beating me up was to hang out with the guys bigger than they were. One of these guys was named Mike. His full name was Michael Schwerner. Then in 1964, the summer of Freedom Riders, he went down to Mississippi to help sign up minorities. He was caught by white Southern men and murdered.”

Reich didn’t mention that one of the other men was a black man. When he finished the anecdote he waited for applause. Few of the thousand of young Berkeley students knew that he was making reference to one of the most historical events in American History. They were killed by members of the KKK. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman disappeared June 21, 1964.

A few minutes before, he had congratulated them on being students at that best university in the world and now it was like watching Jay Leno. “Who were Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman?” (Answer: “They ran an Ice Cream Company?”)

Then Reich was gone, swallowed up by a crowd of admirers. Thousand of students milled around, not knowing quite what to do. Then, somebody put on some music from the '60s.

A young woman named Amanda told me that she had come all the way from Australia to study Hip-hop but ran, unexpectedly, into the Occupation Movement instead. After she left, I ended up having a conversation with Dylan, a young white boy about 20. He said he had been to all of the Occupy movements in California: San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa and Oakland. He said the race relations was improving. The main reason, he said, is that most white kids have no contact with black people. Their parents saw to that, I suggested, and he agreed. Like the generation represented by Reich, they blew smoke up their children's behind about being the best and going to the best schools, but they shelter them from the real world, where there are lots of poor people and black people. By working in Occupy Oakland, he said he had met so many black people he liked. He had to learn all kinds of stuff, about how to get food, and how to stay warm, and how to - well, basically - to survive.

I turned and looked at Dylan. He had the most gentle eyes.

Wow, I'm thinking, maybe he is right: things are looking up for young white people. Maybe they will use the Occupy to soul search, and maybe they will pull themselves out of their trance their parents have put them in.

I said goodnight to Dylan, finally, and walked past the crowd, headed back to my car, and drove home. It was about 10 p.m. and it had been a long day.

Riot Cop Explains: "Minorities should not complain about the tuition hikes because they do not pay anything to the university."

UC Berkeley student films a riot police officer saying that "minorities should not complain about the tuition hikes because they do not pay anything to the university. They live off grants and financial aid." EE Katz, badge # 66.



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Another riot police officer from Oakland Police Department, Brandon Wehrly (2010 Salary: $118, 619.30, 2010 Overtime: $40, 301.53, Total 2010 Salary: $158,920.83) explaining why baton blows are "non-violent."

We Are the 99%: UC Berkeley Edition

(link)

On Birgeneau's Response to the Racist Bake Sale

Facing a national controversy about the stupid racist bake sale, Chancellor Birgeneau swooped in yesterday in a desperate attempt to appease the campus community with a tepid mass email. The UC administration is afraid of bad publicity, but it's also terrified of the rage of students, workers, and faculty who, over the past two and a half years, have confronted strikingly and explicitly racist acts (e.g. nooses) with mass direct action that threatens the university's desire for control. The UC administration's responses to those racist actions were hollow and vapid at best -- calls for "tolerance," false equivalences with the Irvine 11, and so on. As David Theo Goldberg wrote at the time,

To say that the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic incidents at UCSD, at Davis and UCSC are cases of intolerance is to imply that that those engaged in these expressions are saying awful things to and about people they reject. To call for tolerance is to address only the awful things they are saying, not the underlying and implicit rejection. It addresses the symptom, not the underlying condition of which the individual utterances are merely the manifestation. We should not say such things, it implies, even about people we find or whose behavior or culture we find unacceptable.

Birgeneau's statement resembles these pathetic attempts. The problem with the bake sale, he asserts, is not its racist politics but rather the lack of civility with which it was proposed. Over at Student Activism, Angus Johnston offers the following critique:

And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”

Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.)

I wrote yesterday about the hundreds of non-violent protesters who have been arrested at UC campuses in the last three years, and I’ll be writing more about those events as this week rolls on. Seen in that light, the failure of ASUC and Chancellor Birgeneau to do more than merely place themselves on the side of sensitivity and civility rings hollow.

As an act of political theater, the affirmative action bake sale is a pretty paltry one. It offers a weak and overplayed analogy to the admissions debate, rehashing claims that have been batted around for ages. What makes it provocative isn’t its form but its message: that affirmative action is an immoral act of discrimination.

That’s what the College Republicans of Berkeley believe, and that is the message they are attempting to convey with their sale. They believe that affirmative action is racist and sexist against against whites and men, and there’s no polite way to call someone a bigot.

Birgeneau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.

This is a good point of departure, but it also seems important to emphasize the explicitly political context in which all of this is taking place as well as the history of racist but more importantly anti-racist action at the UC (and more generally throughout California and the country). The administration's key consideration, as always, is its ability to manage, that is, to channel all social tensions through the bureaucratic apparatus in order to neutralize their unpredictability and to continue to extract value from the users of the university without interruption.

[Postcript Tuesday 2:18pm]: Yes.

(photo via @mrdaveyd)

Study: White Students More Likely to Win College Scholarships

Yet another myth about "entitled" minority students busted:

"The report found private sector scholarship programs actually tend to perpetuate historical inequities in the distribution of scholarships according to race:

This does not appear to be due to deliberate discrimination, but rather as a natural result of the personal interests of the scholarship sponsors. Scholarship sponsors tend to establish scholarships that select for characteristics, activities and talents of interest to them. These factors, in turn, tend to resonate with students of the same racial background as the sponsor. For example, African-American students are much less likely to participate in equestrian sports (horseback riding, polo, rodeo), water sports (scuba diving, sailing, surfing, swimming, crew, water polo) and winter sports (ice hockey, skiing, snowboarding, figure skating) than Caucasian students."

Read more about unintentional rodeos and regattas here.

Meanwhile, "Wealth Gap Between Minorities and White Americans Doubles After Housing Crisis, Recession."