BAMN’s Bad Behavior
Dear Editor: This regards BAMN’s behavior (“No Compromise,” April 26).
I am a strong supporter of affirmative action and am always dismayed to read the same misinformed, popular white mythology in opposition to affirmative action as “reverse racism.”
However, it did not surprise me that — unlike all other diversity rallies at U.C. Berkeley — violence against Telegraph Avenue area shops and people by mass-imported high school students, was associated with “a BAMN event” rally back in March. According to one observer, who strongly supports affirmative action, but opposes violence, a BAMN speaker implicitly encouraged the violence that day as part of some “world-wide revolution.”
BAMN has had a very unsavory, and even slimy, background in recent years on the Berkeley campus. No group supporting diversity ever allied themselves with BAMN. In fact, diversity groups used to note at the bottom of all their posters: “Not BAMN Affiliated.” Ego-driven BAMN used to practice a grossly unprincipled “rule or ruin” behavior, whereby, if BAMN couldn’t commandeer a diversity group, it would try, repeatedly and shamelessly, to disrupt it.
Such behavior caused, in particular, bewildered white students less familiar with diversity issues to shun any diversity involvement at all. BAMN also tried to claim as its own, the successful events of other groups.
BAMN might as well have been secretly working for some right-wing elements or as police provocateurs. Former Black Panther David Hilliard was once asked such a question about BAMN. His response was that if some group is behaving that way, or if everywhere they go they sow confusion [and] disunity … you should treat them just the same … as though they were intelligence provocateurs, and just move on without them.
So, BAMN finally got its “mass rally.” It’s unfortunate that the campus has lost a generation of pro-diversity and pro-affirmative action students, who were all too well aware of BAMN’s unprincipled tactics. Now, BAMN collects those uninformed into their ranks.
I am not absolutely opposed, in theory, to strategically and symbolically attacking well-documented and well-known symbols of corporate or state oppression.
But we at Berkeley are not in that situation: We are not in the time or place for this. I am opposed to mindless attacks on property — and certainly on innocent people. I am opposed to threatening the workers inside offices and small businesses — the workers BAMN declares it loves so much. While most high school students that day were not attacking anyone, there should have been internal monitors (at least not encouragement) to manage the unruly.
BAMN attempts to glamorize itself by using Malcolm X’s words (“mass, militant, worldwide … revolution”). But when Malcolm X said, “by any means necessary,” he meant by disciplined means necessary. He didn’t mean that you should go out and do whatever you want. He certainly didn’t ever go out and physically attack members of other groups during their rallies, as BAMN has done.
Malcolm knew that … there are moral issues if a movement must resort to “violence.” Instead, any “violence” should be “principled armed struggle,” and as Nelson Mandela said, as “a disciplined fighter for liberation.”
BAMN — a loose cannon — will ultimately be a counterproductive dead end.
Joseph Anderson
Berkeley, Calif.
Going Another Way, Going Bananas
Dear Editor: Thank you very much for publishing the story about the eye-opening results of the survey conducted by the Committee of 100 (“How America Sees Us,” April 26). It comes to me with more fear than surprise to know that one out of every four non-Asians views us negatively.
Will a survey be done among young Asian Americans and their attitudes toward fellow Asian Americans, their cultural roots and Americans in general?
I observe that many young Asian Americans are losing their “Asian-ness.” The less educated ones are discarding their Asian values, and sadly, adopting less than acceptable values of other races in speech, dress and worst of all, mental attitude.
Then, there is another group of more educated Asian Americans who are more Americanized and who are turning into “bananas,” yellow outside, white inside. This group is turning their backs on their Asian-ness — culture, history, language, their own kind (especially new Asian immigrants), food, values.
While we are all Americans, is it too utopian for Asian Americans to preserve their Asian-ness? Are our younger generation giving up on good Asian values?
Perhaps there should be more Asian cultural centers established to empower Asian values for Asian Americans, or an effort to make Asian studies more inclusive in school curricula.
Jeffrey Lim
Oakland, Calif.
AsianWeek Not for Me
Dear Editor: I plan to stop picking up your newspaper. I would never buy it, but I was (like most people I know) just picking it up because it is free.
Your paper is just too whiny and self-centered for most of us young Asian Americans. I, and every one of my friends whom I have asked about it, feel when we are reading it, that it is not really addressed to us and to our reality as the majority of us see it, especially young Asian Americans. Some of your imagined and contrived alliances that you attempt are a joke. No one who I know feels that we have anything in common as a group with disenfranchised transgendered people, etc.
Also, your attempts to ally us with other “minority groups” like gays or African Americans around some imaginary central issue, like the fact that supposedly white people hate and discriminate against both of us, is contrived and superficial because it ignores all the other realities in the equation that you don’t address. And that is the fact that both we and the majority of African Americans have vastly different outlooks, lifestyles, ideas, family structures, values, and (success) ethics. These differences lead to a totally different end result in both our communities. To attempt to unify us around the fact that some white people are ignorant and prejudiced is a stretch, taking into account the fact that we are far more different than we are alike. In short, I have much more in common with my Greek, Arab, Persian and Armenian friends than I do with almost all African-Americans that I have ever met.
Also, our own Asian group is not free of bonehead prejudiced ideas, either. Ever ask your grandmother if it would be okay to date a white guy? You will soon find out that many of our people are also blind and ignorant to America’s promise. The virus of prejudice, distance, mistrust and ignorance has also infected us, too, and is not only limited to whites. If you take a secret poll in our communities on how we view whites, particularly our group’s over-40 generation, you may see us as far more racist, self-centered and stuck on our “differences” than we are forthcoming, accepting and open-minded. Reference your female columnists who constantly harp on the undesirability of dating anyone but Asians, etc., and the picture of your paper as one that doesn’t practice what it preaches, or worse, practices it selectively, clearly emerges. If it wasn’t free, I wouldn’t even bother with it, but even as a free paper, it is just not worth it. It is depressing, whiny, arrogant, inaccurate, distorted and just a plain waste of time.
Hea Jin Choi
San Francisco
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