Anthony Platt, a professor of social work at California State-Sacramento and author of numerous articles on civil rights and affirmative action, recently organized a "Day of Dialogue" on Proposition 209 at California State-Stanislaus.
"It's a very mean-spirited moment of history that we are right smack in the middle of. I was an affirmative action hire. I made it into UC-Berkeley when there was institutional racism," says Platt, a white native of England who taught at UC-Berkeley for eight years before moving to CSUS. "I graduated from Oxford and everybody was white when I came to the school. All of us were able to do this without being engaged in full competition with students of color and women.
"We have just began to change the structure and policy, color and gender of a place like the universities and this will take us back to the pre-civil rights era. We have had 16-1/2 generations of organized white supremacy and segregation and one generation...to try to change the culture of racism and transform these institutions. And just when we begin to make these changes, remedies started to be abandoned. The little that is left of affirmative action will be destroyed by 209."
Fahizah Alim is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee.
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