The Strike Explained

The Strike Explained, Third World Liberation Front. This pertains to the UCB strike

• “[…] the University as it is presently constituted is a white middle-class institution, and the education offered here reflect the cultural values of the white middle-class. […] They will have the group power, which a few individuals do not have, to resist the pressure to submit to a culture which is alien and basically hostile to them and the community they represent.”
  • “It will take intensive efforts and sacrifices on our part to enable Third World students to gain what schools in the ghettos and barrios have kept from them. If we do not accept this responsibility however, what we are really saying is that we accept the system of privilege which gives us access to elite jobs because we were born into middle class white families and condemns other to low paying and menial jobs.”
• “We have been conditioned to accept the violence and force used by the privileged class of this society but not the force with which oppressed peoples react. Yes, the strike is coercive but so much more is the normal, non-strike functioning of the University. To speak of the coercive aspects of the strike as immoral while at the same time silently acquiescing to the planned violence of the society and the University’s role in it, is in every sense hypocritical. […] To participate in the strike is, admittedly, to participate in an act of coercion but it is one very different from the coercion that made the demands necessary in the first place. […] If we are forced to use a strike, it is not out of choice but out of necessity in facing such a coercive society and university. One cannot in this kind of situation escape from the relative uses of coercion, because there is no middle ground.”
• “But whites are also victims of racism because it brings about a false perception of reality. This false perception of reality is in part created and reinforced by an education which distorts or omits the histories, experiences, contributions, and present conditions of TW people in this country. This is often done in a very subtle and perhaps unconcious way. TW students constantly notice it but white students rarely do. The establishment of a TW College, which would be open to white students as well, will help to perpetuate a more honest and fuller perception of reality by correcting the distortions and filling in the omissions about TW peoples which characterize so many courses in the university. This can be a major step toward eliminating the racism which makes victims of us all.”

Goals

• provide a high education but retain cultural identity; return to communities and improve atmosphere
• autonomy and control to maintain meaning in curricula; counter of white domination and colonialism
• self-determination

Demands

• establish a Third World College with guaranteed funding and faculty
  • all faculty should be recruited for individual departments of Asian, Black, Chicano studies
  • all faculty should be hired by 3rd world faculty, students, and group leaderss
• establish administration—TWLF rapport for college development
• Heyns, suspension of classes for university meeting: 28/01/1969; publically televised debate on merits of proposals
• formal declaration:
  1. That funds be allocated for the implementation of the Third World College
  2. The demand for “Third World people in positions and power.”
  3. Specific demands.
     1. 3rd world applicant admisssion
     2. 30 work study positions for Chinatown and Manillatown + 10 EOP counselors w/ 1 full-time Asian Coordinator
     3. 30+ positions for work study AASU East campus Beerkeley High School
     4. Permanent funding status for implementation of programs for center of Chicano Studies
  4. The demand for Third World control over Third World programs
  5. That no disciplinary action be administered in any way to any student, worker, teacher, or administrator during and after the strike as a consequence of their participation in the strike.

Ideology of Self-Determination

• structural and academic recognition of white deprivation of nonwhite education and selfhood
• recognition of individuals of TWLF demands, definition of studying
  • “How can one study in dignity one’s own culture, a culture filled with white denials of its peoplehood, within structures that continue these same denials.”
• serve needs of own community, not the interests of white and business community; benefit the oppressed
  • current and relevant curricula
  • “At this moment in history who can demand that academic consideration take precedence over the needs of the Third World communities? Moreover, whites do not have the right to make that choice. That choice must rather lie in the hands of those people for whom the choice is a question of survival, those people who are members of the Third World community.”

Ideology of 3rd World Enrollment

• reject normal standards of admissions — standardized testing and grades
  • “How do you test a Third World person who refuses to believe the distorted education that he did receive?”
• twofold issue of enrollment and education; open acceptance of 3rd world communities

Good Faith and History

• nine months since African-American proposal of Black Studies dept.
  • → rewrite into secret document by Dean Knight
  • secrecy from executives of College LS and no plan to include Black students
• paternalistic attitude towards TWLF
• exclusion of 3rd world peoples from administrative meetings on minority greivances
  • David Blackwell, head of implementing committee for Black Studies
  • Andrew Billingsley, UC Black Assistant Chancellor for Student Affairs
• “extensive effort” of 4 Black, 9 Mexican, 1 Native faculty member disproportionate with population
• obscuring intransigence with tokenism
  • Chicano Presidential Assistant w/ decision-making powers → 11 arrests → Presidential Assistant w/ suggestion powers
  • Asian course → months negotiation
  • Political Science rejection of Black Studies course on Racism, Colonialism, Apartheid → 1wk ltr tenure for a racist teacher from University of Kentucky
• specific exclusion of field work study from 3rd world college curricula
• only reactions made to demands, not initiated
• attempts to cut out proposal inclusions, no concesssion
• 16,123 employees; 1440 (9%) 3rd world
  • 4-5k hirings; 306 minorities
• increase of 2300 employees and 6500 students to be proportional to population census
• involvement with Vietnam morass by technology and social science
  • counter-insurgency research (Project Camelot)
  • chemical and biological warfare research
• intervention against farmworkers’ union
• co-opt of “black capitalism”