SHANNON KELLY
Perspectives Editor
When my University of Michigan friend called complaining about the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By any Means Necessary (BAMN), I brushed off the group as campus activists doing nothing wrong by exercising their freedoms and rights by marching for affirmative action. I do, however, fully disagree with its belief in forced race diversity and complete disregard for intellectual diversity.
My once distant relationship with BAMN turned personal after a little more investigation on its Web site. There I noticed that the group is actually careful not to leave Los Angeles or the rest of the country out when it plans its marches, protests and walkouts.
I clicked on the L.A. link and was re-directed to a slide show — how thrilling.
I thought BAMN might have legitimate arguments or even some suggestions for fixing the problem it addressed on its multi-media presentation, “Overcoming Separate and Unequal Education In the Greater Los Angeles Area,” but the slide show taught me not to have high expectations for this organization.
Most people would appreciate the virtually text-free, 73-picture presentation, and even though some say a picture is worth a thousand words, don’t apply that saying BAMN’s lazy compilation of photos. Not even 73,000 words can do this slide-show justice or render it useful.
Here’s a quick breakdown of its attempt to convince me that the L.A. school system is unfair and racist, which was titled “ A Challenge We Face.”
Slide 15 shows Roosevelt High School; a large, yellowish building with grass in front. Three or four minor pieces of trash were in the street.
Slide 16 broke down the school’s demographics; “71.5 percent black and 27.6 Latino.”
Keeping in mind that Roosevelt has mostly black students and Latinos and a trash problem, click “next slide.”
Slide 17 displays Palos Verdes Peninsula High School (PVPHS) with its fresh-cut grass lawn surrounding clean cement benches.
Slide 18 paints PVPHS 60 percent white and 30 percent Asian student population in a trash-less paradise.
I went to PVPHS and I have a feeling BAMN’s photographer missed lunch-time when trash was strewn all over the lawn and pizza sauce lathered the cement benches we sat on since there were far from enough lunch tables for all 3,000 of us. But yes, there were a lot of Asian people and white people — what’s the point?
Slide 19 doesn’t answer that question. Neither do any of the remaining 54 slides. They display images similar to the one that illustrates Crenshaw High School’s messy lab rooms and one of its broken lockers, only after the slide that showed one of PVPHS’organized classrooms and a functioning locker. The photographer simply failed to capture my broken locker, which I always had to kick to shut and then employ a strong friend to re-open it after the imminent jam.
Since most of my teachers expected students to respect their rooms and would not dismiss class until they were spotless, it would be hard to find a beat-up classroom. Either way, I remain confused as to how these images prove BAMN’s apparent point about unfairness and racism at Los Angleles high schools. It even pegs the school system “separate and unequal,” as if we’ve gone back to pre-Brown v. Board of Education times.
All I can infer from the slide-show is that this affirmative action group means to say that comparing trash and broken lockers at one school to the school where trash is thrown away and broken-lockers remain undocumented, is proof that the mostly white and Asian PVPHS is an example of racism in Los Angeles’ education system.
Until BAMN puts captions on its pictures or makes a rational argument, all it can expect its Web site visitors to do is infer, which is exactly its plan. That way, they can stir uniformed high school and middle-school students’ emotions in order to build up a loud, revved-up, irrational mass to bring back affirmative action “by any means necessary” — scary.
04-13-2006