“The party connects to a longer history of blackface and dehumanization of Black people going back to the 19th century. It also reflects a profound disrespect for Black culture, specifically hip-hop, which is often trivialized and not taken seriously as a culture with roots in histories of Black and Latino/a struggles for survival and recognition,” said Dr. Chad Williams, an associate professor of African & Afro-American studies at Brandeis University and a 1998 graduate of UCLA who served as the chair of the African Student Union while on campus. “UCLA’s frat culture is extremely exclusionary and often blatantly White supremacist. The party sends a disturbing message about how some students view Black people, at UCLA and beyond.”
The incident, many say, was the latest in a long line of incidents that create an uncomfortable environment for students of color on the campus.
Third-year transfer student Aman Williams said that, “while the incident … prompted #BlackBruinsMatter demonstrations, the movement itself is in response to prolonged racist anti-Black sentiments which has plagued the Bruin community at large for quite some time. From my observations the Black Bruin consensus is the university continues to foster a campus climate not conducive to student success by failing to take action against issues of racial inequity.”
Aman Williams said that many have missed the underlying campus climate that has undergirded the most recent activism.
“The reality is the university has been grossly negligent for many years in addressing the concerns of the Black Bruin community. UCLA has not instituted initiatives to deconstruct oppressive capitalistic policies, neo-colonial models of education pedagogy, divested of corporate imperialism, nor done anything substantive to combat the micro-aggressive nature of the racist anti-Black campus climate,” he said. “In many ways, UCLA as an institution serves to propagate the abuse and exploitation of Black people on campus and beyond. This is what has sparked the uprising of the Black Bruin community.”
According to university data, the campus has a roughly 4 percent Black enrollment ― fewer than 2,000 students on a campus of more than 43,000.
