LOS ANGELES, February 21 — In the aftermath of Ferguson, graduate students at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have been motivated to fight racism and police brutality on campus. The university bosses have responded by organizing forums on “policing equity” and promoting a new vice-chancellor position of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Many Progressive Labor Party members protested in Ferguson against the racist no-indictment decision of killer kkkop Darren Wilson, and were arrested. One such PL’er suggested that students here on campus organize their own forum to point out how the university system is complicit in producing and perpetuating the racist ideas that underpin police terror against Black and Latin workers.
Universities Churn Out Racism, Sexism
Last week, several student organizations came together to hold a forum on diversity in the curriculum and student body at UCLA’s graduate student programs. A student who has been involved with Black Lives Matter spoke first about why students need to get more involved in actions to fight the racist policing of students on campus. A PL student followed and presented pictures from his visit to Ferguson and discussed his experience fighting the police.
It is important to be involved in campaigns demanding a more diverse student body. It is also important to expose that the university system is another organ of capitalist rule. The first college in the U.S. was Harvard, created to train the next generation of ministers, magistrates, and public officials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The history of universities in the U.S. is entrenched in slavery. The holy trinity of bondage was the church, the state, and the university. The universities are central to developing scientific racism to justify slavery and genocide. This history gives a glimpse of the nature of universities under capitalism.
The racism in education in the U.S. can be understood as facilitating the political economy of capitalism, which is built on the racist super-exploitation of Black, Latin and immigrant workers. Many Black and Latin students will have access only to vocational training to fill the ranks of workers needed in the low-wage healthcare, clerical and public sector industries. Some will fill the ranks of workers in research universities who produce the racist and sexist material for capitalist culture. Many others will simply have access to the imperialist military machine. A young college professor participated and added that faculty are afraid to speak up about confronting the university’s racism because they fear losing their jobs.
Forum, Step Forward to Fighting Back
This forum was the first step in the process of organizing students and professors. It generated much enthusiasm and excitement in a part of the university that has been traditionally passive. Some are committed to confronting the college bosses’ call for “policing equity,” an oxymoron. The term exposes the underlying capitalist propaganda that students and racist cops can get along.
Only the working class — not courts, cops, and politicians — can be trusted to fight for equality. Working-class equality doesn’t include the bosses and their government. Many of our friends correctly want to connect the struggles against racist police terror to anti-immigrant racism: deportation and detention. There is much to be done on the campuses today. Continued unemployment means the student population on campuses will continue to grow. And as colleges and universities grow, and occupy an increasingly central position within the political economy of capitalism in the U.S., they will become ever more important centers of political struggle. It is up to communists to steer these struggles toward revolution by building a wide international network of fighters.