The Defend Affirmative Action Party at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California at Berkeley stand in sympathy with students on campuses across the country who have relatives and friends who have suffered in the attacks in New York and Washington.
As anti-racist student parties, we call on all people to oppose and stand against anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry, xenophobia, war hysteria and national-chauvinist backlash in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We must oppose all chauvinist hysteria, all racist attacks, and all scapegoating. Remembering the attacks on Arab Americans in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, we in particular condemn all bigotry and attacks against Arab, Islamic and Middle Eastern people. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, racist hysteria against Japanese Americans led to the internment of nearly 120,000 people solely on the basis of race—we must never allow anything like that to happen again. We call on students at every school and university across the country to speak out against racist and bigoted responses to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
It is the duty of every anti-racist, every progressive and every person who supports basic democracy to oppose xenophobia and national-chauvinist war hysteria in response to these attacks.
—Defend Affirmative Action party representatives;
Jessica Curtin, student government representative of Michigan Student Assembly; and Hoku Jeffrey, student senator, Associated Students of the University of California at Berkeley
I would like to say how very much it meant that Dean Wolff and her colleagues at the School of Music, the student glee clubs, and the U-M and community chorus pulled together to offer us a great gift last Friday at Hill. It showed me that when the enormity of our national tragedy seems too overwhelming, music can truly be a healing force.
—Leslie de Pietro, coordinator of Family Care Resources Program