Ann Arbor
THE MENTION of President Bush’s name received a predictable chorus of boos in the Chemistry Building here Monday as affirmative action supporters rallied in the name of Martin Luther King. Bush is one of the “racists and segregationists who want to turn back the clock” on Brown v. Board of Education by opposing affirmative action, rally organizer Shanta Driver told several hundred high school and university students. Last week, the administration filed a Supreme Court brief denouncing the University of Michigan’s race-based law school and undergraduate admissions policies.
“I’m very distressed that the president has tried to play politics and divide people on this important issue,” added Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow, who promised to do everything possible to “stop [this] erosion of civil rights.”
A march for affirmative action followed by a rally was but a small part of the 16th annual University of Michigan Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium. Students and community members attended a host of honorary lectures and forums put on by individual departments. There were activists and diversity experts, even a performance by the Business and Finance Diversity Choir.
Since its inception, the MLK Symposium at Michigan has expanded from just the traditional holiday to a 44-day-long production (this year it began on January 6 and runs through February 18). A 35-member planning committee approves events and awards funds to student groups wanting to commemorate King. Although the committee prescribes a yearly theme–this year’s was Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world”–no event is turned down. “MLK meant a lot of things to different people, so [the committee] doesn’t get involved in content,” says Dr. John Matlock, associate vice-provost and director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, which oversees the symposium.
Affirmative action and racial diversity have been perennial themes at the symposium. Speakers and presenters this year almost uniformly took positive views of these policies, exhibiting what Boston University anthropologist Peter Wood identifies as a misunderstanding of King’s “single garment of destiny” metaphor.
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” King’s metaphor presents a problem, Wood writes in his new book “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept,” for those who want to remember King yet ignore his message of unity. “For some, the solution has been to reinterpret it by emphasizing the separateness of the threads rather than the forceful interweave.”
This more current interpretation of the single garment of destiny was on display during Monday’s observance of MLK Day. Before the keynote speech, university president Mary Sue Coleman affirmed the school’s commitment to racial diversity.
“We cannot afford to lose [the cases before the Supreme Court],” she said to a standing ovation. Coleman said she is pleased that President Bush supports diversity in higher education, but disapproves of his characterizing Michigan’s admissions process as quotas.
Headliner Grace Lee Boggs, a veteran of numerous social movements and founder of the urban renewal program Detroit Summer, praised the university for its “courage” in using race-based admissions. In a speech primarily focused on good citizenship, Boggs urged the audience to “embrace the responsibilities of global citizenship and say no to the war in Iraq.” The September 11 attack, she said, was a “wake-up call” for us to more closely scrutinize problems with Western Civilization.
Asian-studies professor Scott Kurashige commended Boggs as one who “introduces us to an MLK who is not frozen in time,” but who evolves to meet the demands of new struggles.
AT HIGH NOON on MLK Day, affirmative-action supporters assembled at a busy campus corner and marched through the streets for nearly an hour in frigid temperatures. Antiwar rhetoric peppered their stock cry, “Affirmative action is the way, long live the fight of MLK!” Organized by the “Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary” (mercifully abbreviated to BAMN), the march attracted several hundred students. Busloads of Detroit-area high school students added manpower and the Cass Technical High School band provided the marching tunes. A chaperone for students from Renaissance High said her school alone sent three busses, and a Renaissance senior reported that some teachers give extra credit to students who demonstrate. As the march was about to get underway, one young girl proudly waved her sign in front of me: “SAVE BROW v. BOARD ” [Sic.]
After the march, BAMN supporters assembled in a chemistry auditorium for the rally, where Jesse Jackson joined Senator Stabenow as a featured speaker. Rally attendees joined a member of the student government’s Defend Affirmative Action party in an inspirational song, fists punched high in the air. BAMN national spokesperson and organizer Shanta Driver warned that “Brown v. Board and affirmative action are under attack.” She invited students to attend a BAMN-hosted civil rights conference at the university later this week, where they will learn how the ACT and SAT are “racist lies” and why “race is a social construction.”
OTHER EVENTS of note on MLK Day ranged from the jam-packed forum “A Dream Deferred: The Intersection of Race, Class and Gender in American Society,” to a mathematics department-sponsored lecture by University of Arizona professor William Yslas Velez entitled “The Parakeet is Gasping.” Dr. Velez lamented the decline in the number of Chicano math majors.
Presenting today will be education professor Dr. Sylvia Hurtado. Hurtado was part of a team commissioned by Michigan (after it was sued) to find evidence that its justification for racial discrimination, student-body diversity, makes sense educationally. She is heading the follow-up study, “Preparing College Students for a Diverse Democracy.”
“Diversity is one of the tools we can use to enhance learning in and out of the classroom,” she says. Hurtado claims that students she’s studied who have substantive encounters with racial diversity in college do better on social-science tests like the California Critical Thinking Skills Test and the Reasoning About Current Issues Test.
Do diversity experiences make a difference on the GRE? Hurtado hasn’t tested that yet.
Dr. Matlock of the Multicultural Initiatives Office says there are between 60 and 75 events related to Martin Luther King Day every year at Michigan. Some of them–such as Monday’s discussion of “To Kill a Mockingbird”–seem almost anachronistically appropriate. Others–such as “Lessons From a Queer Muslim” (planned for January 24)–fit right in with the new spirit of MLK day.
Beth Henary is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
