By Any Means Necessary: Student activists who make no compromise Back in the Day: Richard Aoki, former hardcore activist and Black Panther.
	How America Sees Us: National survey shows many Americans prejudiced against Chinese Americans (in National News) Oakland Cultural Center Changes Name — Again (in Bay Area News) International Showdown: Selling arms to Taiwan (in Business) Mistress of Self: Interview with author Chitra Divakaruni (in A&E) Emil Amok: Busting Stereotypes (in Opinion)

The BAMN core trio: Ronald Cruz, Hoku Jeffrey and Janelle Charles. Says Cruz, “This is definitive and the regents will have no room for excuses. We’re showing them the same methods that instituted affirmative action in the first place.” Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

By Any Means Necessary

By Ethen Lieser & Neela Banerjee

It is peacefully positioned among other student organizations, such as the Asian American Association, Justice in Palestine, and Muslim Student Union. The place is U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. Some students scurry by like water bugs, possibly late for class. Others saunter through the plaza, sipping on coffee and gossiping with friends. Drummers maniacally hammer out beats. Guitar players pluck stringent notes. Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome” comes to mind. One student, affiliated with the East Bay Christian Fellowship, hands out flowers to anyone who happens to walk past her booth. “Appreciate God’s beauty,” she says, while fingering the flower’s stem. Smiles blossom on the faces of those who accept the gift.

A few feet to the left, a tiny blue table is flooded with literature, barely withstanding the Berkeley wind gusts. Photos and newspaper headlines surround the table. No flowers are given out here. And even in this gregarious, state fair-like atmosphere, there are no signs selling fried cheese curds or snow cones. This is the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) booth.

The Sproul Hall steps, armed with a microphone and sound system that is regularly used as a platform for students to speak, are only a glance away. To the booth’s right, a towering building has the words “Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union” stretched across its facade.

“Growing up, I admired Martin Luther King,” Ronald Cruz, a student activist and co-leader of BAMN, says. “Just look at the determination and courage he showed.” Sitting behind the makeshift booth, BAMN leaders Cruz and Hoku Jeffrey are busy at work. It’s not homework for school. It’s homework on life.

On a Cruz-Sade

Hoku Jeffrey and Ronald Cruz at their table on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Photo by Ethen Lieser.

Cruz, 23, a senior majoring in ethnic studies, patrols the Sproul Plaza pavement like a vulture, handing out fliers and discussing political issues with students. He is an oracle, answering questions about BAMN or affirmative action with the detail of a philosophy paper. But then again, this is his real school.

He also spearheads the BAMN sign-up program, for which he garners around 20 signatures per day. The signed-up students, who, Cruz says, number in the thousands, receive the latest BAMN information through e-mail and newsletters. Cruz, a Filipino American, was born in San Francisco, where he spent most of his childhood until he flocked to the mecca of social activism — Berkeley. Justified or not, school comes second, a distant second.

“I do have a good grade point average, but I find many times where I can spend three or four days in a row without looking at my homework,” says Cruz, smirking as if his parents were listening.

Openly gay since his freshman year at Berkeley, Cruz uses his sexual orientation as a launching pad for his activism, effortlessly exchanging rhetoric on activism and orientation as if they were the same subject. “Being gay and a political activist go hand-in-hand,” he says. “What drives me is the fact that I’m gay. It’s almost as if I have to be political.”

üo look at Cruz, one must see and know activism. Because he wears activism, sleeps activism, bleeds activism, talks activism, breathes activism. Stare into his tired eyes and one will see strength, an ability to keep truckin’ even if the gas gauge reads empty. Cruz proudly flaunts a yellow button that is the size of a half-dollar, pinned on his innocuous, loose-fitting red pullover. It says: “Reverse the Ban.”

BAMN was founded in July 1995, in response to the attack on affirmative action within the University of California system. In a movement spearheaded by Ward Connerly, the Board of Regents passed the ban against what it called race-based preferences in its admission policy. The move was seen as the first step in a nationwide series of blows to affirmative action policies. The following year, California voters passed Proposition 209, abolishing affirmative action in state public institutions.

BAMN’s goal is to reverse the regents’ policy, known as SP-1. But even if BAMN successfully pressured the board to repeal the ban, racial and ethnic preferences wouldn’t be restored because Proposition 209 supercedes rulings made by the U.C. Regents.

"Because the Regents were the first institution to ban affirmative action, basically leading the attack,” Jeffrey says, “if they were to reverse the ban here, in the place where it all started, it would really send a strong message to the rest of the country. Then we could move on to working on 209.”

Last week, the State Assembly Committee on Higher Education passed a resolution that calls for the U.C. Regents to repeal SP-1. The resolution, introduced by Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys and Marco Firebaugh, D-Huntington Park, is likely to pass in the upcoming months with strong support from Democratic leadership. BAMN members consider this a major victory.

Though largely symbolic, the repeal would enable administrators and admission officers to do a more holistic review of college applications. One portion of SP-1 says that the top 50 to 70 percent of applicants, according to grades and SAT scores, are put in a separate pile, and from those, the top scorers gain entrance. Using the system, not all applicants’ essays are read. Admissions officers “can’t look at whether the person was in honors club or juvenile hall for seven years,” Paul Mitchell, education consultant with the State Assembly, said.

Implementing broader standards for admissions could be key to increasing minority enrollment. After SP-1 took effect in 1991, numbers of African American, Latino and Native American students all dropped. Recently, though, U.C. Berkeley reported that African American and Latino numbers are up, while Asian American enrollment is down. Still, BAMN leaders contend that information is skewed, and that admissions of historically disadvantaged groups continue to be low.

Asian American Activism

That the leaders of BAMN are Asian American indicates the struggle for equality goes beyond personal gains. (Hoku Jeffrey and Janelle Charles are hapa.)

“It is surprising to a lot of people to find Asian American students in the leadership of this struggle,” U.C. Berkeley Asian American studies professor Ronald Takaki says. “Because there is this myth about how Asian Americans are against affirmative action.”

rakaki points out that this is indeed a myth, citing that 61 percent of Asian Americans voted against Prop. 209.

“When the Prop. 209 vote was coming up, I would ask my Asian American students how they were going to vote on this issue, and a lot of them told me they were going to vote against it,” Takaki says. “They said, ‘Without affirmative action, my brother or sister would have a better chance of getting into Berkeley. But I am Asian American. I am Asian, but I can’t just think about my ethnic community or my family. I am also an American; I have to think about what is good for the larger society.’

“I think this is what drives people like Hoku,” Takaki continues. “We are not doing this for any ethnic specific-interest. We are doing it for the principles of ethnic equality.”

Gone Too Far?

Since their inception on Berkeley’s campus seven years ago, BAMN has been the center of controversy. Their radical ideologies and all-or-nothing tactics have brought heavy criticism from other student activists, the media and administrators. Even though they formed specifically around the ban on affirmative action, BAMN’s vision goes beyond specific politics and policies — they seek to “create a society where equality truly exists.”

“We want to reverse the approaching resegregation of the U.C. campuses that has been happening since the ban; we want integration of K-12,” Jeffrey says. “They have been promising equality for some 200-odd years now. We are fighting to make this real.”

BAMN’s Bay Area chapter has about 40 active members. Across the country, the only other chapter is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of BAMN’s main principles is that they work independently of any institution, whether it be political or educational. Co-leaders Cruz, Jeffrey and 17-year-old high school student Janelle Charles stand firmly by this ideal, emphasizing that they only rely on their own strength and mass organizing.

“I think it is never a weakness that we only rely on ourselves,” Charles says. “When we went to L.A. for a Regents meeting a while ago, we saw local organizers relying on Bustamante and other people to listen to them. They weren’t taking any strong action.”

BAMN’s intense dedication to action has earned them names like “sectarian extremists.” A recent East Bay Express feature story focusing on BAMN’s intervention in the Oakland Teacher’s Union, characterizes the group as wild-eyed activists who “[L]ong ago lost any credibility on the U.C. Campus … Almost everyone regarded them as amusing caricatures, forever wailing from loudspeakers at indifferent students walking through Sproul Plaza.”

Reporter Chris Thompson writes about his own experiences seeing BAMN members in action, accusing them of turning students who “were not terribly political” away from any kind of activism as a result of their radicalism.

U.C. Student Regent Justin Fong echoed Thompson’s concerns, saying that in his years of activism at Berkeley, he found BAMN to be a contentious organization in many ways. Fong even went as far to say that he saw BAMN as a force countering student activism on campus.

“As much as they do seem to be a strong voice and a critical voice on campus, they have also been a disruptive voice in terms of student activism,” Fong says. “They have been a source of frustration for a whole generation of student activists.”

Fong thinks that 70 percent of what BAMN is saying is correct, but he finds their lack of coalition-building to be problematic.

“Their message is very stringent and toe-the-line, and they don’t build a lot of those bridges,” Fong says.

Asian American student activist and Berkeley fourth-year student, Chantip Phongkhamsavath, thinks that the tactics BAMN uses just don’t work on issues like reversing the ban on affirmative action. Yelling at politicians through loudspeakers, Phongkhamsavath says, doesn’t work on statewide levels.

“I respect their ideology and dedication. It’s the same ideas and end-goals that all activists want,” she says. “It’s just the approach that I don’t agree with.”

BAMN leaders say they have been working with other groups, and that their principles of mass organizing call for the mobilization of all people who are interested in the struggle for equality. BAMN was responsible for the March 8 Day of Action on Berkeley’s campus, which drew thousands of Bay Area high school and university students out in protest of the five-year-old ban. BAMN criticized the media coverage, which highlighted violence and looting that broke out during the rally.

“The racist news media will reach out and try and attack the movement, especially the youth of the movement,” Cruz said. “I think it was hypercritical of the media to call the non-events that happened on March 8 political violence.”

BAMN has also been organizing in the San Francisco Unified School District around the issue of resegregation in the aftermath of the Ho vs. SFUSD case, which restricted the district from basing school admissions on race. A junior at Thurgood Marshall High School, Charles joined BAMN after Jeffrey came to her history class to try and recruit people for the movement. Now, a year later, she stands alongside Cruz and Jeffrey as one of BAMN’s key organizers.

“I think BAMN’s greatest accomplishment was its getting the youth to step up and take hold of their future,” Charles says. She adds that when the school district banned classes from attending the March 8 Day of Action, students still went and BAMN gave them the courage to do so.

Even though she has only been involved in the movement for a year, Charles says she been grappling with race and ethnic issues her entire life. The bi-racial child of a Filipino mother and African American father, Charles says: “My parents are what you would consider invisible people in this society.”

When asked about the source of her dedication, Charles responds evenly: “This is my future. If I don’t fight, who is going to fight for me? Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks fought for me, and now that it is falling apart, I am going to fight.”

Back to the Mundane

Cruz usually wakes up around 6 a.m., tends to his one class per day (the sixth-year senior only needs six units to graduate this year), then scurries to the tiny booth on Sproul Plaza, rain or shine. If it rains, a tarp is used. For six years, he has spent five-to-six hours a day there on average. Later, he might attend a meeting or two, then make phone calls after he goes home. But for Cruz, it’s all worth it.

“Particularly in the moments when you see it pay off, like when you see thousands of people coming out for a cause,” he says. “But something like that isn’t even the high point, because there is confirmation everyday in what I’m fighting for.”

Cruz met Jeffrey, a 23-year-old ethnic studies major, as a freshman in late 1995, just several months after the inception of BAMN. And from their professionally-lipped dialogue, having a drink together at the end of the day seems out of the question. “Our relationship is 99-percent political,” Cruz says. “It’s a mutual respect because we respect each other’s political strengths.” This school year, they ran together as presidential and vice presidential candidates for student government. The results of the elections are still pending.

While Cruz might look like a friendly next-door neighbor, Jeffrey, originally from Hilo, Hawaii, ferments political intensity through his appearance. Draped over his husky frame is a Raiders jersey, hanging down his waist.

“I used to be a big football player,” he says, his face seemingly unable to change expression. His jet-black, curly hair is neatly bound into pigtails. His ears and eyebrow are pierced.

Ironically, these two are supposed to be the voice of Berkeley activism. But on the non-political front, like in social, everyday situations, they are relaxed, laconic. Cruz is a brooder, mulling over questions till it can get uncomfortable. Then, his voice rings out like an educated politician, reciting his answer as if he is reading it in verbatim from his mind. Jeffrey, however, is a man of few words. He is serious, to-the-point; a smile is a waste of time.

They basically stumbled into their activist roles. “I was never politically active in high school,” Jeffrey says. “But once I went to a BAMN meeting, I got really excited.”

Says Cruz: “There wasn’t as much opportunity [for activism] in high school. But when I did speak, it was on the environment and through the school newspaper. I just consider myself as a political person.”

Even though both Cruz and Jeffrey will graduate within a year, they will continue to stay involved with BAMN. Sitting at the tiny blue table? That’s still in question.

“We want to see BAMN as a national, youth-led organization that is recognized across the country as the leader in the fight for equality,” Cruz says. “We also want to learn from the movements of the past, mistakes and successes of the past, in order to lead the new civil rights movement. I think we will be the organization for any young person who inspires to become a leader, any person who believes this country should live up to its ideals of justice, integration and equality — this is the organization to join.”

As long as these two activists are at the helm, don’t expect BAMN to succumb to a dot-com-like fatality. They are serious. Maybe almost too serious.

The clock radio beeps; hitting the snooze bar is not an option. It’s 6 a.m. and the sun is on the rise in Berkeley. They get up. Guess what Cruz and Jeffrey will be up to today?