Dear Editor,

Recent events connected directly and indirectly with the UCSD that promoted racist attitudes aimed at the denigration of blacks and black heritage have shattered our image of scholastic solidarity into stark pieces of confusion, anguish, resentment and outrage.

To the empathetic, resolute characters of this institution who know and live the true colors of our campus, there is no clearer call to action than now to unite in body and spirit against this foul growth on our free soil, pick up the pieces and reconstruct the cherished image of this school into its accurate form.

This bastion of learning, this citadel of higher human aspiration that is UCSD, still brightly burns, blind to the color of its petitioners, but now behind a disgraceful facade that threatens to distort the passions of a supermajority and inextricably associate the origins of the offending acts with the good name of our institution.

Racial prejudice is not any more of a systemic cause at UCSD than it is at other locales of higher education across the United States. Neither is the stem of this revulsion rooted in the representative philosophies of our masses.

Where then does it lie? It festers in the bowels of that terribly troubling and yet terribly precious American sacrament: The First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution.

If any part of these incidences should be held as an error, it is that we have been too open, too tolerant of material that elsewhere would have found no refuge in expression; that elsewhere, its very thought would likely have been detected and policed long before it even took chance to articulate itself and thus join the great domain of American inclusion.

With such zeal we press the flag of equality and liberty be raised, and with such sincere conviction do we call for the unequivocal animation of these principles throughout every part of this campus and the community which it serves (even in admittance of bigoted aspects), that to hear and see ourselves steeped in accusations as invidious and repugnant as racism is akin to the writhing of virtue besmirched with a foreign poison.

The sentiments of a few extremists and agitators, along with a general campus atmosphere of stoic academic interaction have twisted together into a cloak of racism that now spans the entirety of our fair fields and rooftops, presenting itself as the real, ulterior constitution of this institute and broadcasting a climate of campus racism to the nation.

But this obfuscation of us will not prevail. A supermajority standing on the pillars of reason and justice cannot and will not bow to a minority of hate, filth and impudence that wholeheartedly misrepresents the students, faculty, staff and administrative body of this university.

Unite now. Let our associations and actions demonstrate these words into an incontrovertible veracity that takes no account of skin color and carries into victory the better angels of our nature.

—Alexander Quest

Senior, Muir College