Whites Subconsciously Digest Racial Biases

By Chris Bissell

On Tuesday night I attended a Claremont City Council meeting in which members of the student body, professors from the Colleges, the City Council, and members of the greater Claremont community debated issues concerning the Irvin Landrum shooting. Those who protested the shooting accused the police officers involved of racism, while those who supported the officers fervently denied that they were racist. The City Council and the Chief of the Claremont Police Department repeatedly assured the community that the officers were sworn protectors of the safety of the entire community, and that racism was not involved in the shooting. [con't]

Rule of Law Deserves Unrestrained Application

By Will Hawkins

On April 26th of this year, the largest organized protest since Tianamen Square was held in China. The 10,000 protestors in attendance represented the spiritual Falun Gong movement. The protestors demonstrated peacefully and represented no political threat to the government.

They simply wanted the government to recognize their spiritual following. But the government remains unwilling.

Since April, the Chinese government has been increasingly critical of Falun Gong. The government has jailed many of its followers and suppressed its demonstrations. Evidently, Chinese authorities believes that order must come at all costs, even at the cost of denying the civil liberties that we take for granted. [con't]

Noise Complaints Threaten Table Manners

By Jonathan Vanasco

Last week’s Student Life featured a story on the shutdown of Open Mic at Pomona College over the summer. This week, as history repeats itself, CCLA’s Table Manners is threatened with a similar fate. This is unsurprising to many–the idea of open turntables has met with administrative disapproval since its conception. Originally meant to be called Open Turntables, low-level administration members strongly suggested the name be changed to avoid confusion with the now-defunct Open Mic. Despite the fact that both events targeted different crowds, featured different music, and were in almost every sense of the term different, the similarities between the names "Open Mic" and "Open Turntables," coupled with the idea of listening to music on a weeknight, somehow made the administration uncomfortable. [con't]

Admin Assumes Paternalistic Stance

By Matt Gerhart

Over the course of this semester, frustration at the administration has increased steadily and reached a high point concerning the Smith Center. Are we plagued by an unfortunate coincidence of individual errors, or are these problems manifestations of more fundamental processes by which this administration operates?

Throughout 1998-9, the Worker Support Committee, five-college organization, presented the college administrations with evidence of distressingly poor working conditions in the dining halls. These ranged from pitifully low wages and lack of health coverage to racist managers. When workers brought these concerns to the attention of management, they were ignored, disciplined, or threatened with losing their jobs; when frustrated workers began to discuss unionization, intimidation and harassment were used to silence them. [con't]

Arrogance Destroys Marine Ecosystems

By Peter Cook

Political enlightenment philosophy is, in many ways, mind-numbing; however, it does serve quite well in the function of a window into what humankind thinks about itself. Let us focus on people’s conception of reason. Enlightenment philosophers were much enamored with the idea that God (or Nature, or whatever creationist force you believe in) gave humans the gift of reason, and that with this gift, people were supposed to figure out what course their life should take. This gift is supposedly restricted to people alone, and puts us in the position of deserved mastery over all of the earth. Thus, it is our job to decide what is right and wrong, not only for us, but for the entire planet, and every organism it houses. We get to decide which animals and plants live, and which die. This idea was not born out of the enlightenment; every human society that has adopted large-scale agriculture practices it. [con't]

Aramark’s Management Skirts Convoluted Labor Regulations

By Aaron Weiss

As many north campus residents will recall, campus life was interrupted on Monday by a parade of students chanting "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!" This march was the latest in a series of protests against Aramark by students sympathetic to the cause of workers’ rights. The previous day, a call to protest was placed in our student listserv, this time in response to several new claims of labor abuses committed by Aramark.

The phrase "workers’ rights" is nothing new to the ears of anyone who has been on campus for more than five minutes anytime since the fall of 1998. Once it was clear that Marriott would no longer be our food service provider, questions arose regarding the future of their staff. Soon after Aramark arrived, allegations began to surface of cost-cutting measures that had resulted in a serious decline in working conditions. [con't]