was googling myself and found this letter i wrote to the Daily Cal in the waning days of my super-senior year.
| ASUC Candidates: Desirable Qualifications, Wrong Minority (although I don't remember writing that tagline) |
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| In his letter to the editor, Jim Fung is "troubled that for the second year in a row, no African Americans or Hispanics, apparently, were elected to any of the five executive offices" ("Election Malaise," April 27). He then questions UC Berkeley's "devotion to diversity." Apparently Fung did not pay attention to The Daily Californian's article from several weeks ago that went to great lengths to point out that the Student Action party was running three Asian candidates (Teddy Liaw, Alex Ding and Jen Chang) for the executive positions. Since Student Action went rampant this year, Fung should have made the connection and realized that minorities are in fact represented in the executive offices. But God forbid that we elect the wrong kind of minorities, which according to Jim Fung, we did. It is bad enough that we have to analyze everything on a racial level — BAMN and DAAP, please take note. When we start having divisions within minority status, this alleged "victim" status loses its Slight Joke classification and rapidly becomes a Complete Joke. Would Jim Fung be able to sleep at night if he found out that Nick Papas, external vice president-elect was in reality a Latino, but just didn't make mention of it during his campaign? Would he be able to look at himself in the mirror tomorrow morning knowing full well that Papas was elected because of his qualifications but not because of his ethnicity? Where I come from, we have names for that phenomenon. When someone votes for a candidate or does not vote for a candidate because of his or her ethnicity we call that discrimination. We call that racism. Should I have voted for Priscilla Hernandez just because she is Latina? Of course not. Should the Latino community here at UC Berkeley have voted for Priscilla just because she is Latina? Definitely not. Being the same race as anybody (not just a candidate running for office) does not automatically mean that you will hold the same political views or values. That's completely absurd, and in and of itself, racist. If Jim Fung voted for either Priscilla Hernandez or Evora Griffith simply because of the color of her skin, then he is not only destroying the democratic process here in the make-believe political arena that is the ASUC, but he is also sadly racist. I, like many other UC Berkeley students, voted for the candidates I felt were best qualified for the offices they sought. And I, like many other students, will not apologize for stepping on Fung's notion of diversity in the interest of common sense. |
See? Makes a world of difference when I'm the Good Cop, huh?
all my love,
Jihad Jimmy, Minister of War Crimes and Chief Defender of the Faith
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