David Wienir
Co-editor of The Diversity Hoax and law student, U.C. Berkeley
Our law school class was the first to realize the effects of Proposition 209, which says that race should not be taken into account when making decisions in public universities. The unfortunate result was that only 18 African Americans were accepted to what was once one of the most ethnically diverse law schools in the country. Of those 18 who were accepted, none chose to attend.

Within the first couple of weeks of attending school, a petition was passed around which said, “We students of Boalt Hall feel that our education is necessarily compromised due to the fact that we lack diversity due to the fact that certain ethnicities are not represented.”

While I would have liked to see more people of different ethnic backgrounds as a part of the community, I by no means think that one’s views are preordained by one’s skin color, so I didn’t sign the petition. Within days, my module and I became known as “Satan’s Seven” because many of us didn’t sign the petition. We became a representation of all that was evil and all that was bad.

Then, one day I was walking with a friend who was from Cuba, and he suggested that we start a fraternity on campus. We were all single guys and law school isn’t the most hospitable sort of environment to find a date. So we announced that we were going to start a fraternity. It would be open to anyone-men, women, anyone of any ethnic background. Within a day there was a message on the dean’s desk that a white supremacist group had been started on campus. Ironically, the founders of this group were two Jews, a Cuban and an Indian.

Later, one day while I was sitting in my criminal law class, the door swung open on both sides of the classroom and in came 20 or 30 people, mostly minorities, students who had not been accepted to Berkeley, but were attending other law schools. They interrupted the professor and demanded that all students who were white, or even looked white, give up their seats. They were basically saying: “Your only reason for being here is your skin color and we think we have a reason for being here simply because of ours.”

I, of course, remained seated. And, when one woman in the front row, who was a student of color, but didn’t look like one, refused to give up her seat, she was called a “white, racist, f– idiot.”

Brian Jones
Director of the Center for New Black Leadership
This is not about people who don’t care about diversity. It’s not about people who don’t care about providing opportunities to people. This is about people who really see the conundrum of how you actually go about doing these things, while at the same time being fair and being honest and allowing people to speak their minds. I think that what happened in the debate over affirmative action in Washington and in California was that the heat of the debate became so hot that people were afraid to speak honestly. This had the effect of really shutting down the honesty of the discussion.

There are two important questions here. The first is a question of what diversity is really about. Is this “diversity” about the tolerance of different viewpoints or is this simply a superficial kind of diversity? The second is the question of the language that is used. Too often, I think, the debate gets frayed in this notion of “Are you for equality or are you against equality? Are you for opportunity or are you against opportunity? Are you for diversity or are you against diversity?” We need to give some serious thought about how it is that we can turn down the volume, or at least turn down the ad hominem volume, in the debate. Honesty is really the way that we’ve got to go.

Tags: education, law student, women

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