On Tuesday Sept. 27, the Berkeley College Republicans held a bake sale featuring a race-adjusted pricing ladder that, among other things, charged white males $2 for a cupcake that cost a Native-American female nothing at all.
The sale was meant to demonstrate the discrimination the BCR felt SB 185 – a new affirmative action-like bill awaiting signature – would establish within the college admissions process. What the sale actually demonstrated was nothing but the group’s ignorance and insensitivity in simplifying a complex issue into a formula as insipid as a boxed baked good recipe.
Charging white men more for cupcakes may appear to some to be a controversial yet “fun” illustration of the reverse discrimination these kinds of legislation supposedly produce. Yet, the problem with political analogies such as this one is how easily they fall apart under the strain of the real-world details that make these issues difficult.
At one point, BCR president Shawn Lewis admitted that this “satirical bake sale” was “inherently racist.” It is more than that; it is insulting. To even assume, on the part of the BCR, that people are definitively of one racial and gender identity or another propagates the position of unacknowledged privilege from which their bake sale methodology operates.
It is a position that allows one to take for granted the idea that people pass legislation encouraging consideration of minorities’ disadvantages not to dispel already present targets but to reverse their trajectory. It is a position that looks at centuries of struggle – entire lifetimes dealing with gender and ethnic adversity – and feels it can truly embody and argue about the intricacies of these continuing hardships with the flippant tagline: “If you don’t come, you’re racist!” It reduces minorities and minority specific disadvantages to a joke and one can only wonder how an organization expects thoughtful debate to stem from a punchline.
It is inherent within the democratic structure of this country that everyone has the right to protest and the freedom to express themselves, but with this freedom comes the implied responsibility to express oneself well. BCR, though right to peacefully protest a policy they feel is unjust, should have protested in a manner that illuminated the issues at hand instead of merely provoking the opposition by jabbing juvenilely at the struggles and history behind minority disadvantage.
The roots of our racial dilemmas run deep and people are too complex to be encapsulated by cupcakes.