They have no right to exist as a group on campus," said Jeff Federspiel, Student Organization Finance Committee chair, in the Nov. 30 Duke Student Government meeting where Estacion Libre was denied both charter and recognition status. We are a campus group dedicated to the political organization and empowerment of people of color and the elimination of the global exploitation imposed on the peoples of the world in the name of free trade. But DSG decided that EL was too similar to other "liberal" organizations.
Federspiel said we were not a "unique" group and that it would be a "terrible precedent if [DSG recognized] two groups with identical missions targeted for two different races; everyone needs to be together in one group, for one purpose."
There is a new racism afoot, and DSG embodies it flawlessly. It calls itself "color-blind" and is promoted by those who stand most to gain from the empty rhetoric of a pre-existent "equality" (which masks the material reality of racial inequality and the persisting social segregation on campus).
But Federspiel is onto something indeed: By insisting that people of color must surrender their unique concerns in the name of some delusion of a "color-blind" society and continue to be satisfied with white-dominated organizations, he guarantees that racial hierarchies-whether on the left or the right-can never be challenged.
Although DSG recognizes both "cultural" groups and "political" groups, they have rejected a group organized around the concept of a 'people-of-color' politics. This is the height of irony for many of the members of Estacion Libre, whose own experiences have led them to explicitly refuse the only two options presented to us on this campus:
1) the objectification made possible by a false notion of a depoliticized and frankly essentialist identity, and
2) the indifference to difference provided by the call to "equality" in race-blind organizations.
In other words, DSG itself functions on the very logic Estacion Libre was founded to combat: that people of color must be held hostage to a homogenizing logic whereby difference will be tolerated only if it is constructed for us to perform for the enjoyment of others, or where our self-articulated difference must be neutralized and silenced in the name of political organizing.
And yet it makes perfect sense that Estacion Libre, whose project is precisely about the self-determination of people of color as active, political agents, would be deemed illegitimate by a process wherein a white-dominated student government monopolizes the power to adjudge for us what differences rise to the level of significant political differences. DSG decides which differences are not significant, and consequently who should be denied "recognition." Such are the indignities of representational politics.
In the Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison says, "Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?" The logic that DSG applies on Duke's campus towards people of color is the logic of the global market, the most powerful force of homogenization today. In this market, you can buy your difference (come get your Salsa tickets and Malcolm X hats!) and you are paid with indifference (the insipid color of money).
This is the logic of the global market on Duke's campus where you can buy your difference and you are paid with indifference-the insipid color of money. In neither case are you allowed to access the means to produce your difference. It should be clear that DSG's decision and the logic it embodies is a danger to everyone. Should queer people be forced into heterosexually dominated organizations? Should women be forced into male-dominated organizations? This decision should be a wake up call for us all.
The struggle against the logic of the global market is the struggle for our very difference. This was the fight of the Black Panthers Party in the United States. This is the struggle occurring across the globe today, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the workers' movement in South Korea and from the Autonomists in Italy to the Piqueteros in Argentina. So too is Estacion Libre creating a politics based on the notion of "people of color" that interrogates the construction, performance and appropriation of difference within capitalism and critically examines alternatives for democratic decision-making processes and political agency.
We are unique (and maybe a little too different) and we are relevant to the student body. DSG may not recognize our right to organize-such is their choice; but as far as the right itself, it is ours. Here we are!
Jennifer Chien is a Trinity senior. She is a member of Estacion Libre.
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