From the Student Intervenors

Racism and inequality on trial

America is at a turning point. As has happened at the other deciding moments in our history, the efforts and convictions of a small but dynamic and growing movement that speaks for the historical interests of an awakening mass of people have changed history.

We, the student intervenors in the University of Michigan Law School case, demanded that Judge Bernard Friedman hold a trial to remove the stigma that the Center for Individual Rights and the other opponents of affirmative action have placed over the heads of minority students at the University and at campuses across the country. The current trial that we have secured opens up a historic opportunity to take American society toward long-promised, long-deferred integration and equality.

We are fighting to broaden the legal justification of affirmative action to include its actual social purpose - lessening the inequality and segregation that structure life and opportunity in America. It is only on this transparently just and reasonable foundation that affirmative action can, in the long-run, be successfully defended from racist and right-wing attacks, both in the court of public opinion and in the courts.

For the first time in one of the many affirmative action court cases, there is a party in this case that is determined to tell the truth to the court and to the nation about the inequality of our society that necessitates affirmative action. With this trial we are turning the tables. We intend to put racism in America on trial. We intend to put sexism and all social inequality on trial.

We will expose the bias and inadequacy of the standardized tests and grade point average as measures of students. These measures reflect and perpetuate privilege. Student and expert witnesses will testify about the racist and sexist inequality that pervade this society and its education system and about the benefit to the society of the steps we have take toward integration and equality. We will expose the bigoted biological-determinist lie that is behind the attack on affirmative action.

We will expose and attack the stifling racist inequality in K-12 education. This condition of society is no longer acceptable.

A profound struggle is underway. The direction of our nation is being worked out in a struggle between two new, yet familiar forces in American history.

On one side are resegregationists who refer to the fiction of formal equality only to attack progress toward real equality, as the proponents of the "separate but equal" lie did just over one hundred years ago; on the other side are, the anti-racists, the forces of progress and integration, of equality and justice.

Just over three years ago, when the legal attack on affirmative action at the University was initiated, the opponents of affirmative action were uniformly confident. The terms and terrain of the conflict have changed utterly. The beginnings of a new period of civil rights struggle have had a profound impact on the social consciousness and on the context of the battle. Our victory is now possible.

Every thinking person must understand the gravity of the moment. The outcome of conflicts like this direct the course of our history. Either American society and its laws will turn toward the segregationist tradition of our history, the Plessy v. Fergeson - the "separate but equal" lie once again - or we will embrace the integrationist aspiration of Brown v. Board of Education and reaffirm our commitment to the struggle for integration, equality and progress. These are the two roads.

Join us in the courtroom to be a part of winning this historic case. A carpool will be leaving every morning from the steps of the Michigan Union at 7 a.m.

- This viewpoint was submitted by Law School case intervenors LSA sophomore Agnes Aleobua, Rackham student Jessica Curtin, LSA junior Erika Dowdell. They are all members of The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), an organization also involved in the intervention.