Ethnic Studies vote delay good decision

by David Safier

I'm back in town finally and trying to catch up on the news in general and the Ethnic Studies news in particular.

Pedicone did the right thing (words I have not written recently) by calling for a postponement of the vote on Stegeman's resolution and the scheduling of a community forum. In his Sunday op ed, Pedicone misrepresented the earlier board meeting as a chance to discuss the resolution, when the purpose was to vote on it. Now, thanks to community pressure — in the best sense of the term — the Board voted to postpone the vote, and we'll have that discussion.

From everything I've read, the crowd was loud but peaceful. Not as loud, I should add, as the old-Republican-white-people shout fests during the Summer of Health Care Reform. I wish Pedicone and the Board members had been at Giffords' town hall that summer. Now that was one angry mob which always seemed just a baby step away from turning violent.

Speaking of violence. The police presence at the Board meeting seemed to have been way, way out of proportion to the potential threat of violence. A hundred police officers? Someone remind me, what is the history of violent action by supporters of Ethnic Studies? I can recall peaceful marches and people being arrested for refusing to leave an area, but I don't remember incidents of damaged property or violent resistance. At the earlier meeting, the protesting kids cleaned up the meeting room before leaving. What well behaved young men and women!

A number of people are saying the call for a hundred-strong police presence was an overreaction based on racial fear. It pains me to say, I have to agree. Tea Party members screaming en masse at a legislative forum doesn't trigger a massive police presence, but brown people fighting to keep an educational program alive does. Tea Partiers have been known to openly call for violent overthrow of the government and to bring weapons to their events. For all the Russell Pearce Republican rhetoric, MAS courses and students do not promote violence or revolution. They promote critical thinking and, when appropriate, dissent and protest. And yet it is the Latino students, who model themselves after Martin Luther King, who are considered the threat, while the mainly white Tea Party, which models itself after a group which stormed a boat in the harbor and threw someone else's property into the water (and was given to tar-and-feathering people who they disagreed with), are given loving press coverage and treated as true, loyal Americans.