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1.
i sense hysteria in this.
again--the sad reality is that every urban university has boundary problems, every urban university has occaisonal violence because, to one extent or another, it seems that every urban university is something of a flashpoint in the ambient class war that characterizes much of the actual life of being-in-the-states that--like everything of any importance--unfolds beneath the venner provided by television. so again, i do not see anything particular about the immediate conditions that obtained at ucla, and certainly nothing that excuses anyone involved with this sorry situation.
2.
nor do i see anything beyond a kind of routine harrassment involved in ths cimputer lab that is at the center of this. harrassment in the sense that having a work-study student come by every hour and a half to check your id again is not about anything beyond reminding you that a discrete duration has elapsed and following on that to provide that work study with a time-index that can be used to nudge students off the terminals if others are waiting. THAT is the primary function of these carding routines. the security function is a sales function.
again, beyond the above, there IS NO meaningful function to this kind of carding.
the question of status is resolved by the fact that the student is logged on--which presupposes that he or she has a valid id and pin number.
3.
the question of racism is not a simple fuction of skin color--geez---in the states since 2001--and by extension since 1979 (with reference to iran) you have sustained mechanisms of exclusion/racism directed against persian and arab students who, from the simple-minded viewpoint informed by skin tone, would be categorized as white. i know many folk who fall into these categories who have had significant aspects of their lives impacted by these mechanisms, and the apparent fact that for folk who have not been subjected to them these mechanisms do not appear to exist says nothing about the mechanisms and everything about the viewpoint of the observer.
but (again) i do not feel like i can say more about this particular situation except to say that the kind of arguments being advanced by jorgelito against the notion of racism being a factor at one level or another seem to me to be beside the point.
but it gets tricky here, because once you shift away from general mechanisms into individual perceptions based one way or another on experiences shaped by them--who gets to determine what is and is not a legitimate occasion for activating such experience or using it to determine what action is or is not racist?
what kind of criteria can one bring to bear from the outside to make a coherent judgment about such situations?
does one necessarily have to accept every perception concerning every situation that is taken or described as involving racism?
if there are problems at that level, does it follow that one should simply invert the above and dismiss all such situations?
what role does skin color in the end play here?
it all seems terribly simple-minded to me to revert to skin color as if that was a determinate criterion--it seems to rest on the assumption that there is only one type of racism in america--which seems pollyanna to me in that americans are often virtuosii in this department. particularly in these sorry times, within which the outmoded notion of "nation" is being propped up with sacrificial narratives that turn entirely on racist assumptions.
but does all this mean that you are simply presented with apparently undecidable situations in every such case?
maybe one asnwer is that you need to know the details.
and i dont.
so there we are.
but that doesn't obviate the general questions/problems.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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