Students should participate in CIR protest

urt Levey of the Center for Individual Rights will be speaking at the Law School Friday, Feb. 4, on Title IX and sex equality in collegiate sports. This is an opportunity for all pro-affirmative action forces on campus to come together in defense of affirmative action and race and sex equality.

The affirmative action movement at the University has provided leadership to the nation's campuses and has gained widespread respect. Because our movement has demonstrated political clarity and untiring activism in response to CIR's anti-affirmative action lawsuits, a new spirit has awakened in all those who hunger for the promise of equality. The 50,000-person, integrated march against the South Carolina confederate state flag, and the sit-in at Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's office by black legislatures in defiance of his plan to eliminate affirmative action, are recent examples of a changing tide in American politics.

The lawsuits against the University's admissions programs are likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court. We are uniquely situated to influence what that Court will do. History is in our hands. And we are very strong.

CIR is coming to the Law School, whose affirmative action program it seeks to do in, to assail Title IX's mandate of sex equality in education. CIR purports to represent the interests of two white women plaintiffs in the admissions lawsuits, but it opposes equality for women. It aims, in a case now pending before the Supreme Court, to bar women from bringing civil action against men who have raped them. It defends sexual harassment as "free speech." Meanwhile, it seeks the dismantling of minority scholarships and the resegregation of K-12 public schools. CIR's assault on Title IX is part and parcel of its attack on affirmative action.

We have more power than CIR. It is well financed, but it is small. It has been unable to inspire any social movement in its image - in no small measure because its most virulent supporters harbor a debilitating, racist fear of black people. CIR's visit to campus gives the affirmative action movement an opportunity to declare that Michigan hospitality does not extend to CIR's resegregationism and sexism.

What CIR says racial equality means is diametrically opposed to the meaning it assigns gender equality. In the race context, it promotes "colorblindness," an abstract "equality" standard that takes no stock of the social inequality pervading American society. When it comes to gender, CIR still denies the existence of social inequality, but it wants women and men to be treated unequally in explicit terms.

It justifies this by asserting that women have a lesser "interest level" in athletics and that they therefore deserve fewer opportunities to engage in them than men. This only makes sense if one accepts age-old, biological-determinist prejudices about what is in women's "nature." If lack of opportunity and encouragement does not limit women's athletic participation, then innate urges must.

Since Title IX's inception, women's participation in sports has grown by leaps and bounds. This can be explained by the social progress achieved by the civil rights and women's movements and by the changes they effected in social and legal attitudes translated into opportunities for women. Growth in female athletic "interest levels" certainly did not occur as the result of impressive, spontaneous changes in women's biological constitution, nor did it happen independently of these social advances. In sum, CIR's arrival on campus is a great chance for the pro-affirmative action movement to flex its collective muscle. CIR has a most difficult road ahead of it in attempting to defeat the black and Hispanic communities for a return to the "separate-but-equal" standard. We should disabuse it of the notion that it can make an end-run around our anti-racist movement with a sexist flanking maneuver.

Join with pro-affirmative action forces, law students and women athletes in a protest of CIR at 3:00 p.m. on Friday the 4th in front of Hutchins Hall (State Street), and participate in a debate following the CIR speaker's panel talk starting at 3:45 p.m. in Room 100.

- This viewpoint was written by

third-year law student Jodi Masley.