Arbor Update

Ann Arbor Area Community News

BAMN's tactics criticized (still / again)

6. November 2005 • Murph
Email this article

UM’s campus NAACP group criticized BAMN last week for including bussed-in high school students from Detroit as part of a rally against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a ballot proposal to ban affirmative action in Michigan. From the Michigan Daily:

Alex Moffett, vice president of the NAACP, said BAMN tokenized and presented black students in a bad light when it bused in hundreds of black middle- and high-school students from Detroit for the Thursday rally on the Diag.

During the rally against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a proposal that could ban the use of affirmative action by the University and the state if it is approved by voters next year, the Detroit students were given microphones and could be heard yelling profanities and slurs at anti-affirmative action protesters at the back of the crowd. Moffett said the students came across as uneducated about affirmative action and faulted BAMN for putting them under the spotlight without preparation.

Representatives of the two groups sparred at an MSA meeting over the comments:

“(BAMN) failed to acknowledge that they didn’t properly prepare these students to come to participate in the rally, and they didn’t accept responsibility for the damage they caused to the image of black students on this campus,” Moffett said after the meeting.
. . .
Moffett was verbally assaulted by a BAMN activist during the meeting, who yelled out, “Alex, are you scared to be black?”

ArborUpdate contributors Rob and Dumi provide comment on their personal blogs, Goodspeed Update, and The Blackblog.