Justice Scalia's affirmative action stance incites protest

Trampling dirty, white snow underfoot as they marched, chanted and encouraged passing motorists to "honk if you love affirmative action," students, professors and activists from around the country gathered to demonstrate outside the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology yesterday afternoon as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke at a closed event inside. "Hey! Scalia! Like what you see? See you April 1 in D.C.!" the demonstrators chanted. With two high-profile cases --Grutter v. Bollinger and its companion case Gratz v. Bollinger -- about to come before the Supreme Court, the future of affirmative action programs in the United States hangs in balance. A march on the Supreme Court, during the cases' preliminary hearings scheduled for April 1, is being planned and coordinated at Penn and at colleges and high schools around the country. Based on lawsuits filed by three applicants to the University of Michigan Law School accusing the university of rejecting white applicants because of their race, Grutter is aimed at Michigan's law school while Gratz targets race-influenced admissions to the university's undergraduate program. Especially since President Bush filed an amicus brief urging the court to oppose affirmative action, the cases have taken on tremendous political weight. "Bush says Jim Crow/We say hell no!" was shouted alongside anti-Scalia and anti-discrimination chants, as demonstrators paraded in a slow oval carrying anti-Bush, Scalia and Trent Lott signs. "We're headed backwards, and that's insanity," History graduate student Kyle Farley said. "America's historical memory is way too short," Farley continued, explaining his participation in the demonstration. "I study American history, so I don't forget what's happened." "It's a mistake to think of this as a black issue or a minority issue," he added later. "This is an American issue." Passers-by and those coming to the event from the west including a long string of well-dressed law students and faculty, nervously edged past the slow-marching protesters. "They're not being disruptive," Penn Law School alumnus David Terry said. "They're nowhere even near the entrance." Offering an extra ticket to the event to the chanting protesters, a bemused Terry offered his opinion on Scalia's relationship to the pending affirmative action cases. "It's a hot-button issue, one out of a dozen or a hundred Mr. Scalia could answer for," Terry said. Others were confused at first as to why the demonstrators were there at all. "Does [Penn] have a problem?" asked Classical Studies Professor Keith DeVries, who happened to walk by the protest. When told that the signs and chanting were directed at Scalia, DeVries response was to the point. "What a horrible person," he said. "Who invited him?" The protesters' opinions of the conservative Supreme Court justice tended to be other than positive. "He's an evil man," said Anthony Monteiro, a lecturer in Afro-American Studies. "He's a throwback to Dred Scott." Second-year Graduate School of Education student Kelley Evans expressed fears that Scalia represented "a return to education where diversity is not represented." "That's going backwards," she continued. "That's the world of my parents." "I'm going forward," she concluded, as she walked back into the circular ranks of the picketers. However, Thomas Fitzpatrick, a second-year law student at Villanova University and a candidate for the chairmanship of the National Black Law Students Association, felt that the event was less an attack on Scalia than a struggle against the policies he represents. "It's not about picketing Scalia," he said. "It's about picketing an idea, a relic." It's about the "equal chance and equal opportunity we deserve as human beings," Washington, D.C. high school student James Barron concurred. As plainclothes Philadelphia police and a University-mandated observer from the Free Speech Council looked on, the protesters exercised their First Amendment rights without incident. Though the question of affirmative action is a decidedly national issue, as witnessed by the participation of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, College sophomore Carl Foreman explained the cases' relevance to Penn. Academic Program chair of the Black Student League and a resident in DuBois College House, Foreman described the possibility that programs such as DuBois itself might be rendered unconstitutional as "scary for me, personally." Estimating the total number of participants at "40 to 50," organizer Vinay Harpalani, a GSE doctoral candidate and a Daily Pennsylvanian columnist, was pleased with the event. "It was excellent," he said. "We made a statement -- that was our goal."

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