In its continuing efforts to keep the public informed about the ongoing admissions litigation, the University of Michigan makes these transcripts of the trial proceedings in Grutter v Bollinger, et al., Civil Action No. 97-75928 (E.D. Mich.), available to the University community and general public. As is often the case with transcription, some words or phrases may be misspelled or simply incorrect. The University makes no representation as to the accuracy of the transcripts.
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1 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
2 SOUTHERN DIVISION
3
4 BARBARA GRUTTER,
For herself and all others
5 Similarly situated,
6 Plaintiff,
7 v. Civil Action
No. 97-CV-75928
8 LEE BOLLINGER, JEFFREY LEHMAN,
DENNIS SHIELDS, and REGENTS OF
9 THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,
10 Defendants.
_________________________________________/
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12 BENCH TRIAL - VOLUME 9
13
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7th, 2001
14
15 BEFORE THE HONORABLE BERNARD FRIEDMAN
United States District Judge
16 Theodore Levin United States Courthouse
231 West Lafayette Boulevard, Room 238
17 Detroit, Michigan
18 - - -
19 Appearances:
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Kirk O. Kolbo, Esq.,
21 R. Lawrence Purdy, Esq.,
22 On behalf of the Plaintiff,
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24 John Payton, Esq.,
Craig Goldblatt, Esq.,
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On behalf of the Defendants Bollinger, et al,
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- - -
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APPEARANCES (Continued):
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4 George B. Washington, Esq.
Miranda K. S. Massie, Esq.
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On behalf of Intervening Defendants.
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20 Joan L. Morgan, Official Court Reporter
21 Proceedings recorded by mechanical stenography.
Transcript produced by computer-aided transcription.
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1 I N D E X
2 WITNESS: PAGE:
3 CHRYSTAL JAMES
4 Direct Examination by Ms. Masley 4
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6 WALTER ALLEN
7 Direct Examination by Ms. Massie 76
8 Cross-Examination by Mr. Payton 176
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12 E X H I B I T S
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14 RECEIVED
15 Trial Exhibit Number 156 126
16 Trial Exhibit Number 157 120
17 Trial Exhibit Number 158 120
18 Trial Exhibit Number 168, 169 112
19 Trial Exhibit Number 176 173
20 Trial Exhibit Number 177 173
21 Trial Exhibit Number 211 119
22 Trial Exhibit Number 212 119
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BENCH TRIAL - VOLUME 9
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1 Detroit, Michigan
2 Wednesday, February 7th, 2001
3 9:10 a.m.
4 - -
5 MS. MASSIE: We'd like to call Chrystal Blossom
6 James.
7 THE COURT: Okay. If you would be kind enough to
8 raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear or affirm to
9 tell the truth in the matter now pending before this Court?
10 MS. JAMES: I do.
11 THE COURT: You may have a seat.
12 MS. MASLEY: Jodi Masley, for the record.
13 C H R Y S T A L J A M E S .
14 being first duly sworn by the Court to tell the truth, was
examined
15 and testified upon his oath as follows:
16 DIRECT EXAMINATION
17 BY MS. MASLEY:
18 Q Ms. James what is your address?
19 A My address is --
20 THE COURT: I'm sorry, can I have your full name,
21 one more time?
22 THE WITNESS: My full name is Chrystal Blossom
23 James.
24 THE COURT: Thank you.
25 A And my address is 11811 Venus Boulevard, Apartment 324,
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1 Los Angeles, California 90066.
2 BY MS. MASLEY
3 Q Ms. James, are you a student today?
4 A Yes, I am, a student.
5 Q And where are you a student?
6 A I am a student at the University of California School of
7 Law, Los Angeles, UCLA School of Law.
8 Q Okay. What year are you?
9 A I'm a second year.
10 Q Did you obtain a BA before going onto law school?
11 A Yes, I did.
12 Q And where did you obtain your BA?
13 A At Stanford University.
14 Q What was your major there?
15 A Public policy.
16 Q Did you perform well there?
17 A Yes, I graduated with honors, so I believe so.
18 Q Were you admitted to the UCLA Law School after the
19 elimination of affirmative action?
20 A Yes, I was.
21 Q How many years after that elimination were you entered?
22 A I believe three years. I entered in 1999. I believe it
23 was three years after.
24 Q So were you the second class that entered?
25 A I was the third class that entered.
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1 Q Without affirmative action?
2 A Without affirmative action.
3 Q Was your decision to attend the UCLA Law School somehow
4 affected by the elimination of affirmative action in
5 California?
6 A Yes, it was.
7 Q How so?
8 A Well, having been at Stanford I knew what was going on,
9 and at Boalt. And I had seen an article that the Santa Fe
10 Mercury Newspaper had done, like a weekend spread, on Eric
11 Brooks and so I knew what he was going through as the only
12 black student in his class. And that affected my decision about
13 going to a UC school period.
14 There was an UCLA recruiter that came to Stanford at
15 the time I was thinking about applying. I was working on my
16 personal statement, and he came and did a little seminar with
17 our pre-law advisor and I attended that. Listened to all that
18 he had to say. And stayed after the seminar or the little
19 meeting was over, and spoke to him about my concerns about
20 what was going on at Boalt, and that was my concern about
21 UCLA, too. And I did not want to go to a school where I was
22 going to end up in that situation. And he assured me that
23 that's not what is going on at UCLA, that they were not having
24 the problems that Boalt was having, that the faculty, the
25 administration were very committed to keeping minority
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1 applicant numbers up, and, you know, I go ahead and apply. He
2 gave me some tips about my personal statement.
3 And so, although I was concerned, I felt reassured
4 by this recruiter that, you know, I wasn't going into that
5 situation. But it turned out differently, of course.
6 Q So Eric Brooks was the only black student entering Boalt
7 his year; is that correct?
8 A I believe so. I know he was the only student who was
9 there at the time that that article was written. So I believe
10 yeah, I believe he was the only one who entered that year.
11 Q And you didn't want to be in that position at UCLA Law?
12 A No, I did not.
13 Q Did you apply to Boalt?
14 A I did apply to Boalt.
15 Q Why?
16 A Because my mother wanted me to apply to Boalt. I did not
17 want to attend Boalt. But my mother has been my greatest
18 supporter throughout my education. And I knew that if I didn't
19 apply, that there would always be this question. And I have --
20 there's actually more to it.
21 It actually starts with undergrad because she wanted
22 me to go to Berkeley. I was accepted at Berkeley, too, and I
23 chose Stanford over Berkeley. And that was sort of against my
24 mother's wishes. So I applied to Boalt for my mother. And I
25 was wait listed which I felt was the best situation that I
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1 could be in because, you know, it wasn't like I actually got
2 turned down, but I didn't have to actually have to go. But I
3 didn't have to look my mom in the eye and say, I'm not going.
4 I could say, oh, you know, I was wait listed, so I could
5 probably, you know, look for something else and let's go to
6 UCLA. So, yeah.
7 Q So you did not think you would suffer the fate of Eric
8 Brooks at UCLA.
9 A No, I wouldn't have gone.
10 Q How many black students ended up enrolling in your
11 entering class?
12 A Two. One other person other than myself.
13 Q When you saw that what did you realize about the
14 situation you were in?
15 A I realized I was in the same situation that Eric Brooks
16 was in. And I was -- I was shocked. And the first day or
17 orientation, when I looked around at my classmates -- and, you
18 know, we all gathered outside in the courtyard, and then we go
19 into this auditorium so that our Dean can speak to us. And
20 when I looked around the room, and there was one other face
21 that looked like mine. And this group of approximately three
22 hundred students, I could only find one face that looked like
23 mine.
24 And, actually, I've been told that there were three
25 African-Americans. And I was searching that crowd for the
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1 third one because I already knew what the second one looked
2 like. And I searching that crowd, you know, are you the third
3 one, you know, desperately seeking that third one. But --
4 well, I later found out who the third one was.
5 Q Is there anything you want to say about the third person?
6 A Well, what I'd like to say because when you asked me the
7 question how many enrolled and I said two. The third person
8 doesn't identify it as being African-American. So when he was
9 approached by African-Americans, he claimed to be Creole. And
10 when he was approached by non African-Americans, he claimed to
11 be Caucasian.
12 So my understanding is that -- because his parents
13 have come to the campus, that his mother is white, and his
14 father is -- at least mix. So his father had African decent
15 in him. But he did not identify as being African-American, and
16 he did not associate with African-Americans. And after the
17 first year, he transferred out of UCLA. So there are two in my
18 class now.
19 Q Have you always been a top student in your life?
20 A I believe so, yes. Straight A, honor roll, yes.
21 Q When you began your classes at UCLA Law, was there any
22 overt hostility on the part of white students to your presence
23 at the school?
24 A When you say "began" do you mean first week, or -- okay.
25 In the beginning it wasn't overt. It was more like I was
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1 invisible. I mean, you know -- the first few weeks, I was like
2 any other law student, you know, wandering around the hallways,
3 dragging this big book bag, carrying these big legal books,
4 scared of the Socratic method, trying to find my way to class.
5 And so it wasn't that I would say overt, you know, racism or --
6 it was about invisible. I was just a non factor. In my
7 classroom, you know, I just sat, sort of a non factor.
8 Q Did you notice that when you or other minorities or women
9 spoke in the class that there were certain responses on the
10 part of other classmates?
11 A Yes. In my civil procedure class -- I had a group of
12 students that sat a row behind me, and who -- anytime a woman
13 or any time a person of color would make a comment, you know,
14 would try to answer a question, because this was the Socratic
15 method, this was our series Socratic method. So everybody was
16 nervous in that class. And our professor was very quick which
17 made me -- probably is why I'm responding the way, the
18 professor -- but, you know, part of what he was training us to
19 do was to speak. And -- people were nervous.
20 But anytime a minority spoke, anytime a woman spoke
21 there's this line of students sitting behind me who are
22 snickering, who are making comments, oh, that's smart, oh,
23 look at her. Later on in the semester because that was the
24 first semester, first year, and when some of the protesting
25 started happening, and there were people coming into our
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1 classroom to announce that there were going to be meetings,
2 that there were going rallies that day. And somebody came in
3 wearing the Affirmative Action T-shirt, and stood up to make
4 an announcement. And these people in the back, you know, I
5 could hear them saying, you know, "F" affirmative action.
6 Just very negative comments. And it was me and a couple of my
7 classmates who were there, all people of color sitting.
8 And we went and spoke to our professor about the
9 fact that this was going on. And our professor made a general
10 announcement to the class, not specific to, you know,
11 inappropriate comments, but more so that you just shouldn't be
12 speaking while your other classmates are speaking, just out of
13 courtesy. So, it was just -- you know, I don't know whether
14 those students got the message that it was, you know, in
15 response to their comments. It was more, he was just making a
16 general announcement to everybody that I don't want you
17 talking while your classmates are talking. So -- it
18 continued.
19 Q The snickering on the part and the comments of those
20 students, what affect did that have on our learning in the
21 classroom?
22 A It added to the fact that I didn't want to raise my hand.
23 I didn't want to speak up. I felt very silenced in that
24 classroom, and it was part of the reason that I felt silenced.
25 Obviously, if you're sitting in front of a group of students
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1 that are, you know, they feel empowered because there's so many
2 of them to make whatever comments they want to make. And you
3 feel like you're just sitting there by yourself and, you know,
4 you don't want to speak up when you hear them laughing, and
5 snickering, and saying derogatory things, you don't want to
6 speak up. And we're talking about a subject that's not even
7 that controversial. Civil Procedure, it's not that
8 controversial.
9 So that's my first semester, first year, that's the
10 experience that I'm getting. And, you know, don't speak up in
11 class, don't raise your hand. Because I was the sort of
12 person, you know, I was pretty confident out. You know, I'd
13 raise my hand if I thought I knew something. I wasn't that
14 embarrassed to be wrong. I've been wrong before in my life.
15 But, you know, I'm not going to risk, you know, being
16 ridiculed and laughed at, you know -- so, yeah, I stopped
17 raising my hand.
18 Q Were there other things inhibiting you from raising your
19 hand?
20 A There were. And in that class and other classes, I
21 started to see a pattern starting to happen in the classroom
22 with the professors as they would call one student and -- for
23 example, in my torts class, I was the only black in that class
24 because the other black student was in a different section from
25 me. We were in the same large section, but different small
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1 section. I was the only student in that semester who never got
2 called on to give a full case reading.
3 If I raised my hand in that class, I would get
4 called on. But I was the only student that never was actually
5 on call that day. And we weren't assigned ahead of time.
6 This -- the professor just picked a student who was on call
7 that day, so to speak, for that day's reading. I was the only
8 student in that section of maybe about thirty-five people, a
9 small enough section that it was obvious that, you know, I've
10 never been called on.
11 In my Civil Procedure class, initially I was raising
12 my hand. I felt like when I raised my hand I was asked
13 questions about the facts. And if I didn't -- I was asked
14 questions about the facts. If we went into any type of
15 analogy, or any type of reasoning at all, and I wasn't just
16 right there with the professor, he would go to another
17 student, and then ask that student to explain what I was
18 saying. Where with other students, if they didn't have -- if
19 they didn't answer the way he thought they should answer
20 initially, they were always afforded the opportunity to come
21 back and say, oh -- you know, after he would say something,
22 and they were offered the opportunity to come back and say,
23 oh, well, I think da, da, da, and explain why, you know -- or
24 add to their original answer.
25 Also in that class, this was a professor who was up
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1 for tenure. And so towards the middle, at the end of the
2 semester, he had, you know, professors coming and evaluating,
3 he was being taped. And I also noticed that days when
4 professors came in to evaluate him, he chose teams. He chose
5 who was going to be call that morning because he would come
6 in, stand at the podium, look at his seating chart, and, you
7 know, indicate -- give some sort of indication that he was
8 deciding who was going to be on call.
9 Well, on days when he was being evaluated, only
10 white males were on call that day. So, you know, once I
11 started seeing this, I realized, you know, this is not a good
12 environment. This is -- I had the feeling that this professor
13 doesn't believe that I have the ability to compete with my
14 classmates.
15 And I went to him, and I said, you know, I'm having
16 a problem in your classroom. I feel that I'm losing my
17 confidence. You know, I feel I don't want to raise my hand
18 any more. And his advice to me was -- I thought it was
19 advice, you know, the first year -- first semester law school
20 student was -- well, you don't need to raise your hand in
21 class. All you need to worry about is doing well on the final
22 exam. So I thought, okay, you know, okay, fine. Okay, I
23 won't raise my hand.
24 And it wasn't until maybe -- maybe over the summer,
25 in the beginning of this second year, that I realized how
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1 wrong and dangerous and damaging that that advice was. And
2 this was a person, you know, I know he was sympathetic to the
3 fact that, you know, there's no minorities sitting in this
4 class basically. But he didn't even realize that there's a
5 strong correlation between me being able to participate and
6 engage that information in class and me doing well in the
7 final at the end. You know, he saw it as two separate things.
8 But if you're not sitting in that classroom, and you're not
9 thinking and engaging in that information -- I mean, of
10 course, you know as a lawyer, it's not -- law is not something
11 you just jump in the night before the exam and try to memorize
12 that information. You need to be working with it the whole
13 semester. And so I didn't realize that until it was too late.
14 But, you know --
15 Q Did it affect your performance on your exam?
16 A Well, yes, it did. I got my worse grade for a semester
17 in his class.
18 Q And are exams the only grades for the course?
19 A Yes.
20 Q At some point in your semester exam, did you decide that
21 you were going to drop out of UCLA Law School?
22 A Yes, after -- first semester we have three exams. And
23 after my first two exams and I decided I was going to drop out,
24 and I made the mistake of telling Lena, the other student,
25 before our third exam, and she was really upset.
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1 Q The other black student.
2 A The other black student. And I didn't -- it never
3 dawned on me, making a statement about my life could affect her
4 life so much. And I was just -- I already felt bad that I was
5 dropping out. I mean, you know, I had to tell my family. But
6 when she called me and she was crying, and she was so upset.
7 And she told me that after I told her that, that she didn't
8 realize having me there meant so much to her, that it was just
9 -- just having a person there meant so much to her.
10 So she ended up calling the Dean, the Deans
11 Admissions at the school, and telling the Dean that I was
12 going to drop out. And this was during finals, and I was at
13 home. And she told the Dean, if Crystal drops, I'm going,
14 too. So they're going to lose their whole African-American
15 class, which was only two, but they were going to lose
16 everything.
17 So I got a call from the Dean, you know, and she
18 talked to me. And I told her about the problems that I was
19 having in class. I told her about the students that were
20 making comments in the classroom. And, you know, she
21 convinced me that, you know, to wait, go home over Christmas
22 break and to decide, to just wait to decide. So I said okay.
23 So we took our last exam, you know. It was bad. I
24 felt so guilty for having told Lena this before her last exam
25 because she was so upset and she doesn't need that extra
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1 burden, nor did I it, but she did not need that extra burden
2 going into that exam, worrying about whether she's going to be
3 the only black student coming back after Christmas break.
4 So I went home, and I talked to my mom, and I talked
5 to Lena, and I really felt like I had to come back for her
6 just as much as for me because this is a single mother with
7 two children, and how could I make a decision that could
8 effect her, you know, so adversely that she drops out of law
9 school? I mean, it was a burden. I couldn't believe that I
10 was making -- I was going to make a decision that I had to
11 decide on someone else's life, that was going to impact
12 someone else's life. It's not my family member, not my loved
13 one, but, you know, just another student there trying to make
14 it.
15 Q In the class where the snickering and the comments was
16 going in one of those classes, did you know the other people
17 well that were being talked about and laughed at?
18 A Yeah, I knew the people that were sitting right beside
19 me, yes. Well, there were three students sitting beside me.
20 And I knew the one that was closest to me well. I knew the
21 person who was on the other side of her fairly well. And the
22 person who was sitting next to me, we were in a study group
23 together. And the person sitting next to her, attended our
24 study groups a little bit during the first semester. And then
25 I didn't know the other two people very well. It was the
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1 beginning of the first semester. So we were on -- like, we
2 would say hi. We knew each other's names, but weren't in a
3 study group together.
4 Q Did the students who were making these comments know
5 anything about those people you're talking about?
6 A Not that I'm aware of. I mean, I never saw them
7 associate with each other. I wouldn't think that they
8 associated with each other. So I don't know how they could
9 know anything more than just the fact that they are first-year
10 law students. They might have known what undergraduate school
11 they came from because that starts like -- kind of the first
12 thing you ask each other, you know, what was your undergrad,
13 what was your major. But more than that, other than, you know,
14 what they look like, or -- no, I don't think so.
15 Q You took Constitutional Law first year?
16 A Yes.
17 Q What do you remember most about that class?
18 A I remember being upset in that class almost every single
19 day. I remember being in that classroom, and feeling such waves
20 of emotions over some of the classroom comments that were
21 happening that I could not follow lecture for ten or fifteen
22 minutes. I remember my legs going under the table
23 uncontrollably. I remember students feeling free enough that
24 when anything was mentioned about color, to turn in their seat
25 and stare me, and I sat in the front row. I had students sit
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1 there and turn to me, and stare at me, to wait for my reaction.
2 I remember Lena getting up and leaving the classroom, running
3 out crying, running out of the school crying not knowing
4 whether she's okay. And -- that was totally my worst class.
5 That was my worst class.
6 I remember lots of racist comments being made. I
7 remember going to speak to the professor in anticipation of
8 problems that I knew was going to happen in the classroom.
9 I don't know if you want me to be more specific.
10 Well, we had problems -- the first problem I
11 remember was with the Korematsu case where, you know, we
12 talked about the case and we covered it in two parts. So, it
13 came before the Brown case, the Plessy case. And the first
14 comment that I remember feeling a little bit uneasy about was
15 a student who said -- who felt like it was okay to round up --
16 it was okay for the United States to have rounded up all the
17 Japanese at that time and intern them because you really
18 couldn't tell who was loyal and who wasn't loyal. So this
19 person was basically making the military's argument in that
20 case, that since you couldn't tell who was loyal and who
21 wasn't, you would just to have to round them all up and intern
22 them. Of course, people are disturbed over that comment. And
23 another classmate, you know, answers back and says, well, I
24 really don't understand your reasoning there, are you
25 suggesting that if the United States went to war with Great
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1 Britain that it would be okay, and that the United States
2 would round up all people of British descent and put them in a
3 internment camp. So the student stopped for a few moments and
4 he, goes, well, yeah.
5 And the significance for me over that exchange was
6 the fact that my professor stayed out of it. And here this
7 person was saying something which I think a lot of us in that
8 classroom felt was, you know, was wrong and maybe insensitive
9 to some extent. But what I got out of it was, that we're not
10 going to have an intellectual discussion about these issues,
11 you know. This person felt comfortable to just blurt out what
12 they said. Yet another student tries to respond, but this
13 person -- once that person responded, this was like, yeah, you
14 know, not even trying to engage in an intellectual discussion.
15 And my professor was not mediating this. He was not
16 encouraging this to -- you know, okay, well, let's have an
17 intellectual discussion about why you feel this way, or let's
18 talk about the law. It was just kind of, okay, we need to
19 move on to the next topic because this is getting a little
20 controversial here.
21 So it was after that comment was made that I went to
22 his office hours and I said, you know, I had seen the
23 syllabus, I knew what was coming up. In fact, we had actually
24 read Brown before. We started reading the assignment before
25 we actually got to class. But we weren't covering the actual
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1 decision in Brown yet we were reading it for something else.
2 But I went to his office hours and I said, you know, this
3 comment really disturbs me. I know we got Brown coming up. I
4 know he was doing Prop 209. He had additional readings
5 assigned for that. So I knew that there was affirmative
6 action coming. And I talked to him about the fact, you know,
7 it's going to be difficult and I'm already feeling
8 uncomfortable in this environment, and you're the professor,
9 you control this classroom. I see you as the mediator and I'm
10 expecting you to control this classroom, and to mediate these
11 discussions. I don't want to censure anybody. I don't want
12 anybody to feel like they're censored in that classroom. You,
13 as the professor, have to mediate this so that we're having,
14 you know, intellectual discussions. And I told him, I said, I
15 feel like one of your responsibilities as a professor here is
16 to teach us as lawyers. We're going to have different
17 opinions. And one of your responsibilities is, is to teach us
18 how to do that in a way where we're not backing each other up
19 in a corner, and just responding for various dispersive
20 stances. Teach us how to talk to each other about
21 controversial things because these are skills we need also.3.
22 Q What happened when you did Brown versus the Board of
23 Education?
24 A What happened --
25 THE COURT: What was the professor's response to
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1 you?
2 THE WITNESS: He agreed. And he came back to class
3 the next day or the next time we had class, and he made an
4 announcement that, you know, we're getting ready to move into
5 very controversial, very sensitive material, and I want you
6 guys to be sensitive to people in this classroom who are going
7 to have different opinions.
8 THE COURT: But he didn't disagree. He agreed that
9 was part of his role --
10 THE WITNESS: He did agree. I don't think he agreed
11 as strongly as I did. But I was coming at it from, you know,
12 I pay tuition here, and I pay your salary, and to some extent,
13 you're here to teach me. This is what I'm here paying for.
14 So I don't know if he agreed as strongly, but, yeah, he didn't
15 disagree.
16 THE COURT: Go on.
17 BY MS. MASLEY:
18 Q I'm sorry, what happened when you read Brown?
19 A It was really, really difficult. Actually, we kind of
20 did a group of cases together. We did the Plessy case at the
21 same time. So there were comments made like about Plessy --
22 there was a woman sitting right next to me, why did he just
23 pass? You know, why would he admit to being black if he looked
24 as though he was not black. And he wanted to ride in the car,
25 why didn't he just pass?
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1 And I wasn't quite upset about that comment as Lena
2 was. That was the day she went running out of the class,
3 crying, running out of school, crying.
4 I don't whether it was because this woman was
5 sitting next to me, and I didn't want to react because I know
6 all eyes on me, and we weren't in the same row. Whenever
7 stuff like this comes up -- I'm sorry -- for Brown -- the
8 discussion of Brown went okay. We focused a lot on the
9 criticism of the decision. And the criticism specifically on
10 the Brown court -- the court using the psychological report in
11 their decision. We focused a lot on that. One of the
12 students who made a comment and basically just said, well, the
13 Brown decision was wrong and it just should have never
14 happened.
15 And that really bothered me because at the moment
16 that they said that, I don't know whether they had the
17 realization that if that decision had not happened, I wouldn't
18 be allowed to sit in that classroom with him, right then and
19 there. And I guess -- it was just amazing to me that he could
20 callously throw out his comment that meant me having to be out
21 of that classroom. It was -- you know, I just had this vision
22 of, like, I'm just not here, I'm just not here. I mean, I
23 don't know whether he considered it and he didn't care, or
24 what. But it was just -- well, Brown should have just never
25 happened.
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1 And I think probably he was saying it not because he
2 doesn't want blacks and whites to be in the same classroom,
3 but because he -- it just didn't even dawn on him, really,
4 what the significance of it was which would be blacks and
5 whites wouldn't be in the same classroom. And that really,
6 really bothered me. So I was really upset.
7 And what happens to you, you're sitting there, what
8 happens to me, my heart starts beating, and I feel this
9 pressure, you know, I feel like I need to respond to that, I
10 need to respond to that. But -- blood starts going, your
11 heart starts pumping. And you don't want to respond from an
12 emotional point -- a perspective because already you're
13 perceived as not being able to be rational, that you just come
14 from an emotional perspective. And so, you know -- especially
15 when you're only being called on to state the facts, and
16 you're not being called on to show that you can actually read,
17 and you can actually analyze. So you have this -- you feel
18 this burden of I need to react, I need to react, but I don't
19 want sound emotional because if I sound emotional they're not
20 going to listen to what I'm saying, they're just going to hear
21 me and go, oh, yeah, that's just exactly what we thought. And
22 so you don't say anything because you're not there yet, you're
23 not -- you know, you're so emotional.
24 And I remember talking to Lena and she's feeling
25 exactly the same way. And she starts telling me, write,
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1 you've got it wright. And I brought my laptop, and I actually
2 took notes on my laptop. Of course, I get so nervous and I'm
3 not that great of typist anyways, but I would get so nervous I
4 couldn't type. So I started bringing paper and pen so that I
5 could just write, write, write, write, just to control the
6 energy and try to come back down. But, you know, for that ten
7 or fifteen minutes I didn't know what was going on in the
8 classroom. I didn't hear my professor. I didn't hear the
9 students. All I heard was my own heart beating; my own head
10 throbbing; my own inner-critical saying, why aren't you saying
11 something, why aren't you addressing this, why aren't you
12 saying something? And then I would leave that classroom, and
13 I would feel such shame and such guilt from not addressing
14 those comments. And Lena would feel the same way. And I
15 would feel I let her down, you know. You know, if she's
16 upset, I need to stay calm. And we felt -- we felt, okay, one
17 of us has to be able to say something, we can't both just be
18 sitting there upset. And so we started to work on it, you
19 know. We started to take turns so that one of us wouldn't
20 feel the burden all the time to speak up.
21 But I felt like -- and there was actually a time in
22 that class when my professor asked what do you think
23 the African-American prospective would be. And a white person
24 answered. I mean, two of us are sitting in that classroom, and
25 he has to ask a white person what do you think the
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1 African-Americans prospective would be on this?
2 So, yeah, I felt pretty much out of control most of
3 the time in that class.
4 Q Did white students complain about your presence in those
5 classes?
6 A When I went to my professor and talked to him about, you
7 know, how I was feeling, he told me that other students had
8 come to him and felt like they couldn't be as candid as they
9 wanted to be in class because Lena and I were in that class.
10 And I was just -- I was stunned that -- because of the comments
11 that were already made, I was, like, how much candid do they
12 want to be? I mean, they're already saying things that are, to
13 me, just, you know, very racist. I mean, I didn't know what
14 they wanted to say. But he told me that. And that's when I
15 said to him, well, I don't want anybody to feel censored in
16 that class, but this is a law school, Constitutional Law class,
17 and we should be having an intellectual discussion here, not
18 just having people shout out whatever little racist thing comes
19 off the tip of their tongue, you know, at the top of their
20 head.
21 So, yeah, I guess -- you know, I only heard it from
22 him, but I guess there were students that felt uncomfortable
23 that they couldn't say what they wanted to say because Lena
24 and I were sitting in the classroom.
25 Q Just because you were there.
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1 A I'm assuming so -- and, well, because we're black.
2 Q Did you have similar experiences in your criminal law
3 class?
4 A I did. The main thing -- well, criminal law, I had that
5 first semester, too. And that was again another class where I
6 realized and my friends realized that we were not ever going to
7 talk about some of the social implications of these cases, and
8 even some of the social prospectives that the justices had in
9 making these decisions.
10 But mainly I had a problem when we got to the
11 Bernard Getz case. And we covered the case in class, and the
12 professor -- and he didn't do this very often in class,
13 decided to make a handout of hypotheticals. So we had this
14 sheet that we received, and it was four or five different
15 hypotheticals. And each hypothetical was a version of a white
16 woman standing at an ATM, withdrawing money, a black man -- it
17 was at night, and a black man coming up to her to ask for
18 directions. And I remember it was the last hypothetical --
19 there were different versions of it. Some, she knew he was
20 going to ask for directions; some she didn't; some he was just
21 this way; some he wasn't. But the last hypothetical was
22 basically that he started to ask her for directions. And she
23 turns around and shoots him with a gun, kills him. And the
24 question, you know, is this legal? You know, is she
25 experiencing extreme emotional distress? I mean under New
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1 York law is this legal? And someone answered, yes. And -- so
2 we get this handout. We don't really discuss it. We just
3 kind of go through the answers, and we leave class that day.
4 I mean we were in just -- I mean, oh, my God, what do you
5 mean, what do you mean this is -- and so we get back to class
6 the next day, we're on a different subject. It's like it
7 never happened.
8 And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, this didn't
9 need to be this way. I mean, didn't this professor, he's been
10 teaching criminal law for years, didn't this professor for a
11 moment think about the fact that he was giving us
12 hypotheticals of a black man getting shot for just stopping
13 and asking directions? Didn't he think about the fact that
14 he's using a hypothetical, a white man who felt threatened by
15 four black youths. This man decided to use a hypothetical
16 about a white woman standing at an ATM who kills a black man
17 without knowing the reason why which for me -- and I can't
18 believe that not for most people -- it brought up the imagery
19 of, you know, back in the deep south where a white woman could
20 just claim anything, and a black man is going to get lynched
21 without even getting a trial. It didn't occur to him that
22 he's invoking the same imagery, and we never discuss it? It's
23 just a handout like, you know, take it home, and then we move
24 on to a new subject the next day. And he's got the only two
25 black students in the class, in his criminal law class, and
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1 that's what he chooses to do.
2 Q This pressure from racism in your classes, did it change
3 your self-image and your relationship to your law school work?
4 A Oh, yes. I mean -- you know, I enjoyed school. I was a
5 good student. I was confident until I got there. And I
6 started thinking, you know, there's something wrong here,
7 there's something wrong. And as I was -- you know, as I was
8 losing my confidence to speak up in class, as I was seeing that
9 my professors had no confidence in me -- I mean, that's what I
10 was assuming by the fact, you know, if they're not calling on
11 me, or they're only calling on me to answer one small little
12 detail, and then, you know, other people would be on call all
13 day in class.
14 I started to lose my confidence about even becoming
15 an attorney, about my capabilities to become an attorney,
16 about my desire to become an attorney. And by second
17 semester, I -- you know, I just said I can't control this, and
18 I started looking to other areas of my life that I could
19 control, and my focus just shifted. So I was there. I was
20 showing up for class every day. But I wasn't -- you know, I
21 wasn't really engaging in it. I was -- I felt like I was
22 spending more time on it, but not with any of the confidence
23 or the optimism that I started law school with, you know. It
24 was more than -- I mean, I had to really force myself to want
25 to do the reading. Forced every day I got up. And -- it's
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1 still like that. Every day I have to convince myself to go to
2 school, and I used to love school. Because when I started at
3 UCLA, I wanted to do the joint degree program. I knew at some
4 point, you know, given how I was going to have to work as a
5 lawyer afterwards, but I wanted to go back and do a Ph.D. in
6 my public policy. And once I got there, I was just so glad I
7 hadn't applied to the business school. It was, you know, I
8 just want out of school, period. I had no motivation or
9 desire for academics. I mean, I love reading. I love
10 arguing. I love writing. I was a great writer before I got
11 to UCLA. I used to have my professors ask to keep my papers
12 as examples for other students in class. I spent my last
13 quarter at Stanford working on my honors thesis, and I loved
14 it. And then all of a sudden, I can't write a paragraph, I
15 can't write a sentence? So it was very discouraging.
16 Q And who was telling you or treating you like you could
17 not write a paragraph or a sentence?
18 A My lawyering skills professor. I mean, you know, a
19 paragraph, nothing good in a paragraph. It was just amazing to
20 me. I know writing from a legal standpoint is different, but
21 it's not that different that you can't even get a paragraph
22 correct.
23 Q Were you ever in classes where professors would go down
24 the row and call on people?
25 A Frequently. In my large section that's -- you know,
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1 sometimes they way the did it. Not in the class where the
2 professor had a seating chart, but in other classes which was
3 more a softer Socratic method. Yeah, they would start calling
4 -- you could see a pattern where they're call on a row until
5 they get right up to me and then they jump to the row behind
6 me, or they jump to the row in front of me, or they jump to the
7 row on this side of the room. And I don't know what their
8 motivation was for that. I don't know whether they felt like
9 I'm not going to call you because I don't want to embarrass
10 you. And I don't know whether they realized that the fact that
11 they didn't call on me, you know, that's what embarrassed me
12 because it was very obvious that they were not calling on me.
13 And so the perception is that they're not calling on me because
14 I couldn't possibly know the answer. And that was a stigma.
15 That was embarrassing.
16 Q What was at stake for you each time you were sitting in
17 those classes and taking those exams?
18 A My emotional and physical well-being was at stake. I
19 mean, if you really want to get down to it, that's what it was.
20 I mean, I was emotionally a wreck, and that's the basic of what
21 was at stake.
22 Next level was at stake, my learning, my GPA, my
23 opportunity. I think most people realized that, you know,
24 your first-year law grades are very important in terms of you
25 being eligible for employment, your summer job, you know,
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1 externship, all of that. All of that was at stake. Every time
2 I got emotional in that class for -- I felt silence in that
3 class and I didn't engage that material, you know, that was
4 effecting how I was going to do on the final exam. How I do
5 on the final exam effects what I put on my resume. It effects
6 my GPA. It effects what I put on a resume. It effects
7 whether I can and I have not been able to participate in any
8 of the on-camp interview programs which our program is --
9 because I don't have the minimum GPA that these firms want.
10 So -- and then, who knows? I don't know how it's even going
11 to effect me.
12 Now -- the battle that I'm fighting now, is that our
13 school has this idea and I don't know whether it's good or
14 not, but that your first-year grades are going to determine
15 whether you pass the bar. And so I'm finding out now, people
16 telling me I'm not going to pass the bar. So maybe all of this
17 is for nothing. Maybe I'm not going to be an attorney.
18 So what's at stake, everything's at stake. Every
19 person who's invested in me up until this point, their
20 expectations are at stake, their feelings are at stake. My
21 future is at stake.
22 Q How would you compare and contrast your experience at
23 UCLA Law after the elimination of affirmative action and your
24 experience at Stanford?
25 A It's like night and day. It's like night and day.
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1 Stanford had affirmative action, and not for one minute that I
2 was at Stanford, not for one minute ever, did I feel -- you
3 know, I attended classes. I was selected into a program to
4 spend a quarter in Washington, D.C. I did an internship at the
5 Department of Commerce. I attended lots of events there that
6 the Stanford and Washington campus had going on. Lots of
7 interactions with different people, with dignitaries. Not for
8 one minute did I ever feel like a student, a Stanford student,
9 a Stanford faculty member, a Stanford administrator thought
10 that I was there because of affirmative action. I came to UCLA
11 Law School after the end of affirmative action, and I have
12 gotten that feeling the students sitting in my classroom, from
13 my professors, from the administrators. I actually had an
14 alumni ask me, how do I think I got in to UCLA Law School? And
15 there is no affirmative action, yet I get treated like I'm
16 there because of affirmative action all of the time.
17 Q When you were being treated and judged in these ways, did
18 you feel like it was just you who was being treated and judged?
19 A No, no. I -- I mean, because I had Lena. And we were
20 going through it together. There were other people of color
21 that were going through it also. But I think Lena and I were
22 spotlighted because there were just the two of us. So we sort
23 of were just highlighted more than the other students. But
24 Latino students are going through the same thing. There was
25 only one Native American in my class, you know. So, they're
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1 going through it, too. So I knew it wasn't just me. It's just
2 that the whole, you know, black and white, it's more extreme
3 with African-Americans than it is. And we were just two.
4 Q You said that many times you found yourself silent, not
5 saying anything, wishing you would speak --
6 A Yes.
7 Q Each time you were silent, what toll did that have on
8 you?
9 A A real emotional toll, a real -- you just -- you lose a
10 piece of yourself. You lose self-confidence. You lose your
11 power. Each time I didn't raise my hand when I knew the
12 answer, each time that I didn't respond to a comment that I
13 knew was wrong, I felt a little piece of me leaving. I felt a
14 little bit of who I was dying off. You know, I was -- I think
15 I was tremendous person before I got to law school. I had been
16 through a lot. I had accomplished a lot. And I felt like this
17 defeated person who had no power, who had no voice. It took
18 thirty-four years for me to accomplish everything in less than
19 a year I felt like I was just powerless, like I had nothing.
20 And I didn't even know -- you know, my mom, she can't
21 understand this. She can't understand why I just can't draw on
22 the strength of everything that I've done before that. She
23 can't understand how sitting in that classroom, day-after-day,
24 and feeling parts of you dying and feeling, you know,
25 dis-empowered, that that's all you can focus on while you're
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1 there. You don't -- you can't just go, oh, well, but yeah, but
2 I used to run my own business, but yeah, I used to be able to
3 do this, yeah, I used to be able to do that. You just sit there
4 and you just feel like I don't have any power, I don't have any
5 strength, I'm weak. You know, that's how you start to feel.
6 You're losing that. It starts to take a physical toll. You
7 can't sleep. You're stressed all the time. So it has a lot of
8 costs.
9 Q Well, you're a tremendous person now.
10 A Thank you.
11 Q How did you finish the year academically?
12 A First year, I did marginally better than I did first
13 semester. And part of the reason for that -- I don't know if
14 you want me to go into the reason why. Part of the reason why
15 was because after your first semester grades which I did not do
16 well, the school has an academic support system. And the way
17 that that works is they have a professor who teaches a class in
18 a sort of a supportive environment. Meaning, you have a study
19 group, and you go to that study group, and you do weekly
20 assignments. And for our first year it was going to be --
21 property was the class. So when -- you're eligible -- I didn't
22 have to go into in, my grades aren't bad enough -- well, first
23 year I don't know if -- I don't think anyone has to go into it.
24 I think it's optional. But, you know, that class is there, and
25 it's to help you. And I remember, you know, Lena and I talking
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1 about it because we're both eligible to go into it. And we
2 talked about the fact that we didn't want both of us to be in
3 it, what would that look like if both of us went into that
4 class, because that class has a stigma. It's the "remedial"
5 class. It's the class of "dummies" who can't make it in law
6 school. So we didn't want the whole African-American class to
7 be in there.
8 And so, I didn't really care for the professor all
9 that much. She had been at the summer program, and -- it's
10 not that I didn't like her personally, I just kind of had some
11 trouble with her style of teaching because her style of
12 teaching is kind of like a kindergarten teacher. We have
13 blue, we have yellow, and I guess that's what they think
14 academic support is all about. So I said, well, I'll stay in
15 the regular property class because we would have had that
16 class together. It was a big section class. So she went into
17 the academic support class, and I stayed out. And I can tell
18 you she did a lot better than I did second semester. So I did
19 not finish the year very strongly, but I did marginally better
20 than first semester.
21 Q Was that what your performance should have been?
22 A No, no. I mean -- I knew the material. I understood the
23 material. Even if I wasn't raising my hand in class, you know,
24 I knew whether I understood what was going on or not when I was
25 able to tune in. I knew I should have done better. I was not
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1 -- it wasn't that I got the exam and I didn't understand what
2 the professor was asking. It's not that I didn't understand
3 what a law school answer took. It's not that I didn't
4 understand that IRAK was. I should have done better, and I
5 could have done better.
6 Q What was it that held you back?
7 A My lack of confidence. My state of mind when I sitting
8 down taking that exam. And my state of mind throughout the
9 semester. I mean, I will have to say that not working with
10 that material, you know, it does impact how you're going to do
11 on the exam. You're not practicing talking about it. You're
12 not practicing formulating the arguments, you know. That
13 effects -- it effects your pace, if nothing else, because you
14 have to stop and do all that during the exam.
15 Q And was it the accumulation of these racist incidents and
16 the atmosphere in the law school that snapped your confidence
17 from you?
18 A Yes. It's like taking a battering every day. And it's
19 still -- I mean, it's not just the horrors of first year
20 because very first-year student has horrors. It's a horrible
21 thing for a year. But, you know, it's even more horrible when
22 you're only one of two, or you're only one, and you're sitting
23 there with these extra burdens on you, on top of just the
24 horrors of being a first-year student. And although the
25 horrors of being a first-year student are over for me, the
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1 other aspects of being at UCLA after the end of affirmative
2 action are still there. I still carry them every day, and I
3 still take a battering over them every day.
4 Q Have you at some point recently taken an academic support
5 class?
6 A Yes, after I -- after I did only marginally better, I
7 went home, and, you know, I was still optimist because I had
8 done a little better, and I was still optimist that, hey, I can
9 turn this around. And at some point, I don't remember exactly
10 what day it was, but in the month of July I received a letter
11 from the Dean stating that I was on academic counselling, and
12 that I would have to have every class that I wanted to take for
13 second year approved by the Dean. And that I needed to take --
14 initially reading the letter, I thought I had to take both
15 classes. There are two academic support classes for second
16 year:community property and wills and trusts, and I thought I
17 had to take both so I ended up signing up for both. So, yes, I
18 was in two academic support classes my first semester of second
19 year.
20 Q And have you felt you've been treated fairly and equally
21 in that context?
22 A In one of the classes I believe I was, in the wills and
23 trusts class which is taught by the professor who taught the
24 first-year property class. So I ended up being in her class
25 anyway even though, you know, I chose not to go in first year.
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1 My other class, community property, I thought
2 throughout the semester that I was being treated equally. I
3 thought I was doing well in that class. I enjoyed the
4 subject. I understood it. I was tutoring other students in
5 that subject. I was attending the weekly study groups which
6 included doing presentations to the other class. I always had
7 great compliments from my professor on the presentations.
8 Up until a week before finals, and part of what this
9 program does is at the end you start taking practice essays.
10 You write out answers to her questions. And there are four
11 questions. You don't have to do it. It's voluntary. And you
12 try to do it as soon as possible so you can get better
13 feedback from the professor because if you wait until the end,
14 everybody jams up, you're not going to get much feedback.
15 So I did that. I turned in my first one, and I got
16 mediocre, you know, you need to improve here, you need to do
17 this. So you keep rewriting it. The advantage to this is
18 that you can rewrite it until you get to that "A" answer.
19 She'll keep telling you what to do to get to the "A" answer.
20 So I needed to rewrite it, so I did that. But it was, you
21 know, getting close, so I decided well, I'm going to go in and
22 do question two and three also. So I submitted those, too.
23 And it was a week before the final exam that I got back
24 comments from her and the comments were, are you intimidated
25 by the question? It seems like you're having a problem, you
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1 know -- because I went and talked to her about it. It seems
2 like you're just intimated by the question.
3 There was nothing -- there were no comments that
4 were constructive in terms of substantive stuff that I could
5 do to correct the essay. It was all comments about me and how
6 I approached, or how I perceive, or how I -- you know, decided
7 to set up my answers. And so -- when I got those, I was just
8 -- I was floored, I couldn't believe it, you know. I went
9 downstairs after getting -- our library, our downstairs is our
10 study area. And my friends were down there. And I was just so
11 upset. I was actually suppose to be outlining. I was suppose
12 to be working on something else, and I couldn't focus. I
13 couldn't focus for, you know, an hour, I'm just sitting here.
14 My friends are telling it's okay, you know, you need to go
15 talk to her. I'm saying, no, no, I'm not going in there, I'm
16 not going in there. And, you know, I felt this way throughout
17 the semester. I didn't want to go any of my professor office
18 hours especially after first semester when I -- you know, I
19 had taken -- the normal approach for me would be if you have a
20 problem you go and talk to somebody about it, you know. I'm
21 not the sort of person that would normally sit there silent.
22 I would go and talk, but I did not have the experiences when I
23 did that. So by second semester, I wasn't willing to do it.
24 And this went -- you know, I was forced to interact with her,
25 but I did not want to go and see her after that. I felt like
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1 I don't need this right before an exam. I don't need to have
2 somebody telling me I can't do this right before the exam. So
3 I was like oh, I'm not going to go. And they talked to me for
4 about an hour. And then I got convinced that, you know, you
5 have to go because I can't go into that exam feeling like I
6 can't do this, like I'm intimidated by the questions. So I was
7 like I need to go back -- I need to go into her office just
8 because I need to gain my power back, you now. Not that I
9 thought she was going to change and tell me substantive things
10 that I could do to perform better on her exam. But I just
11 needed to go there and gain my own personal power back so that
12 when I sit down to take that exam, I'm not coming from the
13 prospective I'm so intimidated by the question is that all I
14 can do is write a bad answer.
15 So I went to her office hours. And one of my
16 friends who is also a student was in her office already, and
17 she asked if it was okay if I come in. So I came in. I talked
18 to her about the comments. And, again, she verbalized what
19 she had written, are you intimidated by the question? And I
20 told her, no, I'm not intimidated by the question, you know.
21 I love this subject. I think it's great. I really understand
22 it. I have a real personal interest in this. And, no, I
23 never felt like I was intimidated by the question. So we're
24 talking, this other student is talking, and a third student
25 comes in, comes into the room, And when she comes in, the
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1 professor asks her can I show your essay, your answers to the
2 questions to these two students still here, and the girl says,
3 yes. So she pulls out her essay, answers to question two and
4 question three, and let's me look at them. She starts talking
5 to the student about something else. And I look at the paper,
6 I think it was question two, on my paper this was the one
7 where I got the comments about being intimidated and she
8 didn't like the way I had organized my answer. I put some
9 headings and she felt like they should be in different spots.
10 And she had drawn these arrows all over my paper, you know, up
11 here, circle this, and, you know, my whole paper just had all
12 these ink marks all over it. And I looked at this other
13 girl's paper, she done exactly the same thing I had done. She
14 organized her stuff with these headings in the same order.
15 She had no arrows drawn on her paper. No line, no circles.
16 She had a little comment that said, maybe you should put this
17 at the end.
18 Q And what is the race of this student?
19 A She was white. And I was sitting there in the office,
20 and I'm looking at my paper, I'm looking at her paper, and I'm
21 going, I can't believe this, I can't believe this.
22 And so I didn't say anything again. This other
23 student who was here with me had a question that she needed
24 answered.
25 Q What was her race?
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1 A She's Asian. I think she's Chinese, I'm not sure. Well,
2 I'm actually pretty sure. I think she's Chinese, yeah.
3 And she had a question, a substantive question, a
4 substantive law question, and she was asking the professor
5 this question. And the professor had moved back around to her
6 desk. So the professor turns to this third student, this
7 white student and tells this student to explain this area of
8 the law to us that she was going to search the Internet. And
9 she turns around to her computer and she searches the
10 Internet. And I actually already knew the answer to this
11 question, but I was the one asking it, so I didn't say
12 anything. But I'm sitting here thinking about, wow, this girl
13 must feel great. She's come in here to find out how she's
14 doing and the first thing the professor says to her is, let me
15 show your work to these poor little students sitting here.
16 And we're all in the same situation. She's on academic
17 counselling with us, you know. So it's not like she was, you
18 know the TA, or she was a third-year law student, she's in
19 exactly the same position as us. And so now her work is being
20 shown as, you know, the example work of how to do things, and
21 she's been there breaking it down to us. So she leaves and
22 she's feeling wonderful, you know, because she knows she knows
23 her stuff, and she's going to take exam in a week and she's
24 going to do great, I'm sure. This is what I'm thinking at the
25 time.
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1 We leave that meeting. And I sit with the other
2 student in the hallway for a half hour while she's crying, and
3 she's totally defeated. And she doesn't want to take the
4 exam. She's scared to death that she's going to do badly on
5 that exam. And that's the difference of what is going on at
6 that school.
7 That's what the end of affirmative action means, is
8 that the few minorities that do get in, are feeling defeated
9 the whole time. And the other students are feeling empowered.
10 And we're competing against each other because we're on a
11 curve. When we go into that classroom, and we take an exam,
12 we're competing against people who are feeling empowered,
13 people who are not carrying the burden of haven't we had a
14 protest, of having to worry about their classmates being
15 arrested, you know. That's who we're competing with. So, yes,
16 is my GPA effected by it? Sure, because I'm not setting the
17 curve in that class, someone else is. I'm just having to
18 compete against them.
19 Q You said you had felt very good about the community
20 property class, you felt very confident in that subject.
21 A Yes.
22 Q What happened when you took the exam?
23 A The exam was half multiple choice which was a change she
24 made this year. It was a closed book exam. It was half
25 multiple choice, it was half essay. I knew the subject. I
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1 knew it so well. I know I knew it. I talked to students, you
2 know, the days before the exam. And I got to that multiple
3 choice, I could narrow it down to two, but I was confused
4 between the two. I didn't trust my instincts. And I found
5 myself going back, circling things in the fact pattern, you
6 know, is it this, is it this, and just going over it, and over
7 it, and over it. And at the time I was doing it, I didn't know
8 my pace was off.
9 But -- there was a problem with the exam. There was
10 a calculation that was further on in the exam, and one of the
11 numbers was incorrect. I guess students had realized it and
12 gone to the proctor and told the proctor. The proctor had
13 contacted the professor to find out what the correct figure
14 was. When the proctor came back to our exam room, and made
15 the announcement that the figure should be this, the classroom
16 exploded. People were so upset. They're yelling, they're
17 screaming. And I look up, I'm not to that section of the exam
18 it. I totally freak out because I think I'm not going to be
19 able to finish the exam because our exams, you know, their
20 race horses. If it's a three-hour, three-and-a-half hour,
21 four-hour exam, that's a race horse exam. And so I panicked
22 because I wasn't even there yet, and these people were already
23 done. So I had outlined my answer, you know, after I finished
24 the fact pattern, I had outlined my answer, I knew what I was
25 suppose to write about for the essay. But because I panicked
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1 I skipped over a whole section that was valuable points to
2 just do the calculation. And I missed that and I ended up
3 with a bad grade in that class, my second worse grade -- well,
4 equally worse grade in law school.
5 Q And when you were taking that exam did you have in your
6 mind the conversations with the professor?
7 A Sure, I had that going in. You know, I had it the day
8 before when I was studying for the exam. Of course, I had it,
9 you know, while I was in there. I mean, you don't ever get rid
10 of it. You don't -- I don't walk away from UCLA and then I'm
11 back to my confident self. You don't -- it's with you the
12 whole time. And it's not just that professor. It's been
13 repeatedly shown to me that their confidence in me is just
14 nill, you know, and not just in me, but in, you know,
15 minorities, period.
16 Q What has the loss of numbers meant to the Black Law
17 Students' Association?
18 A Well, it meant that we almost didn't have it. First of
19 all, we lost the National Black Law Journal. I'm not on a
20 journal. We don't have -- and I could be on another one, but
21 they don't interest me. But we don't have a National Black Law
22 Journal.
23 Last year most of the student organizations -- at
24 UCLA, second year run the student organizations. In April is
25 when they have their elections for who is going to take over
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1 and be the officers. April came along, Lena and I are looking
2 at each other, well, we don't need an election because there's
3 only two of us.
4 I guess we just -- I knew, I knew from first
5 semester, I remember one day -- the first time I attended the
6 Black Law Students' Association meeting, I remember walking
7 home hyperventilating because I thought, oh, my God, oh, my
8 God, I have to run this thing by myself next year because Lena
9 feels -- keep in mind, she's a single parent with two
10 children, age six and eight. She has to go home to her
11 children, and I understand that. So I have to carry a lot of
12 the burden of being places and speaking for our class because
13 she couldn't be there because she was with her children. So
14 in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, oh, my God, I have to do
15 this by myself. I can't do this by myself. I don't even want
16 to do this. When I came to the school, I never wanted to be a
17 leader of the Black Law Students, I wanted to be a member and
18 suppport a leader. No, I just wanted to be a law student.
19 And so April comes. Lena and I realize we have to
20 do this. But the people who are running it now don't want us
21 to do it. They want BLSA to die because they don't feel like
22 Lena and I can do it. And when they lost the National Black
23 Law Journal, it was -- it was sort of like this slow
24 unrecognized gap. It was just kind of like, we just don't
25 have enough people to do it any more. We don't have enough
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1 people to write. We don't have enough to edit. We don't have
2 enough people. And they just sort of closed up the doors one
3 day, and I mean literally because I had to go in and clean
4 that office up.
5 It was pens sitting on a piece of paper, like this,
6 like this. It was like somebody just up from the desk that day
7 and they locked the door and they never opened it again. So
8 they didn't like that to happen with BLSA. This is a very
9 active group of people, and they wanted attention to the fact
10 that there weren't enough black students to warrant the Black
11 Law Students' Association. So they fought against that. They
12 really -- they did not want us to take it over.
13 But Lena and I felt like we've already lost so much,
14 you know, there's nothing there for us in terms of support.
15 And they would say to us, what do you have -- what can both of
16 you view that you can't get? Well, being -- having the Black
17 Law Students' Association opens doors that -- just being
18 Chrystal James doesn't open. Number one, it opens a
19 connection to the other Black Law Students' Associations in
20 Southern California which we really need because they have job
21 fairs. They have academic support teams. They have social
22 events. They have community. And we needed to have that. It
23 gave us a mail box. It gave us a phone number so that when
24 different events were going, there would be some way for
25 people to contact us. And we thought that we needed that.
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1 Plus, we thought we deserved it, you know. Every second year
2 has the opportunity run their student organization. And we
3 felt like we deserved to have that. That's the least we
4 deserve to have. And so we fought.
5 We didn't really have a faculty advisor who was real
6 supportive. What we found was a faculty advisor who said if
7 you want to do this -- I'm not telling you, you should, but if
8 you guys want to try and do it, then, you know, I will be your
9 faculty advisor.
10 And we have an annual solidarity dinner. And
11 fortunately we went to that dinner and our alumni were very
12 supportive and saying, don't let BLSA die, don't let BLSA die.
13 So Lena and I did, but we came very close to not even having
14 an official student organization.
15 And another fear for us is that if we let it go now,
16 it's very hard to get it back. And people were telling us
17 that. And so we struggled. And when we took it over, you
18 know, we realized that we're going to be very limited in what
19 we could do so we made basically two goals for the year. One
20 was to support any first years that came in because we didn't
21 have it. And the second was to try to develop our alumni
22 contact because we really have to depend so much on our alumni
23 now because we just don't have the student population any more
24 to do hardly anything. So we're requiring a lot more from our
25 alumni.
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1 Q From talking to other students, to other black students,
2 you got a sense of how the numbers had dropped.
3 A Yes.
4 Q And from those discussions what was your understanding of
5 the number of black students in the entire UCLA Law School in
6 1996?
7 A There were eighty students there. Eighty. And, in fact,
8 that was published on the Website. What BLSA had is a Website
9 which is a one-page text that had no links or anything. But
10 there were eighty students there in 1996. I was, like, eighty?
11 Eighty students? I can't imagine what it must be like to be
12 walking around at that law school with seventy-nine other black
13 students here. I mean, we have, what, like ten right now or
14 less than ten because people go off on externships and stuff
15 like that. And it was just incredible. I just -- and they tell
16 me -- you know, the other thing was the Black Law Students'
17 Association had -- I think, like, three years in a row, one an
18 award for their community service.l And that was another reason
19 why they wanted us to give it up because they didn't want to
20 see it diminish. It had been such a great positive and
21 effective organization, they didn't want to see it dwindle into
22 this nothingness, you know. So it was like -- I just couldn't
23 believe it. And the things they were able to do, the community
24 that they had there, that these students -- because the third
25 years had entered -- there were still two years, two classes
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1 there, that were pre-209. And so they had the experience of
2 having lots of blacks there, lots of blacks feeing positive,
3 feeling optimistic, feeling powerful, feeling confident. They
4 experienced all of that. And they would talk to us about it.
5 It was incredible. I just -- I'm sorry I'm not having that.
6 I'm jealous.
7 Q Did BLSA normally have a graduation dinner?
8 A Yes, that's one of the responsibilities of the second
9 years who are in the organization is to give their third years
10 a graduation dinner -- or party -- a graduation celebration,
11 whatever they decide it should be.
12 Q And the year you graduate, is that a graduation dinner of
13 two?
14 A I believe it's going to be. There's a possibility it may
15 be three only because there is a student who's in our -- who is
16 a third -- she would be a third year now, but she had to take a
17 semester off because she had a baby. And I think she's going
18 to walk with us. She's not really our class. She didn't enter
19 with our class, but I think she's going to walk with us. But
20 who knows even whether she'll walk, but yeah -- I mean,
21 technically, yes, it will be a graduation of two.
22 Q And have you done anything to compensate for that?
23 A We haven't done anything for us because it will be -- it
24 will be the students that come behind us, that over. But for
25 our graduates, there are three who are graduating, who Lena and
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1 I have the responsibility of giving them some sort of
2 graduation celebration. And we're just -- you know, we're
3 talking about it now this semester because it's coming up. And
4 it just seems so ridiculous to plan this big party for three
5 people. And so what we're doing is -- and actually one of the
6 third years suggested that we try to combine with LLSLO, the
7 Latino-Latino Student Law Organization and AIPLSA, which is the
8 Asian Island Pacific Law Students' Association so -- because
9 their numbers are down, too. And then AILSO, American Indian
10 Law Students' Organization, they have, like, one graduate. So
11 we're trying to combine together all of the third years so it
12 can at least seem like a party; otherwise, we could all get
13 together, five us, and go, yea, you made it. But we want it to
14 be a big celebration. It's a big accomplishment. And we want
15 it to be a big thing. So that's the way we're going to have to
16 do it is all of us get together so we can have, you know, have
17 more than three or four people there and have a big party. I
18 don't know what the details of it are going to be yet. We're
19 just starting to plan it.
20 Q How many black students were admitted your year?
21 A I believe eighteen.
22 Q And it was two -- three?
23 A Well, there's some question as to whether the third one
24 actually checked the box or not. So at least by the end of
25 first semester the official number was two. So, yeah, two to
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1 three of us, or two and a half enrolled.
2 Q The fall in the numbers is really profound.
3 A Yes, it is.
4 Q I want to know if it's just a question of the numbers.
5 Had you had many experiences of being one black person in a sea
6 of white people before?
7 A Oh, sure. In my undergraduate, I've been in classes
8 where I was the only black. I've been in history classes where
9 we had to discuss slavery, the end of slavery, reconstruction,
10 civil rights. I've been -- most of my work situations, I've
11 been the only black. I had a career in banking. I was the
12 only black in the office. Even right before I went to law
13 school, and I worked in a legal department, and I was the only
14 back. No black attorneys in my area of the department, anyway.
15 And I was a legal assistant. I was the only black legal
16 assistant. There were no black attorneys. So I've been in many
17 situations. I grew up in a town where there was only one other
18 black family.
19 Q What is different about this?
20 A What's different is the way you're treated because of
21 being the only black. And in the past, in my experiences, I
22 always -- I always felt okay about it because I had people
23 encouraging me, people making me feel good for my
24 accomplishments, for my ability, for my skills, for my work
25 ethic. And here it's just the opposite. People have this
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1 assumption already and they perceive to treat you based on that
2 assumption. It doesn't matter what you're doing. You know,
3 when I'm sitting in that classroom, especially the first few
4 weeks, those professors don't know, you know, what my abilities
5 are. They don't know my resume. They don't know what I've
6 done before I came to their classroom. They can probably look
7 at me and see that I'm an older student than the norm that's
8 sitting in that classroom. But they don't know what my
9 experience has been. But their assumption is still that I can't
10 answer their questions other than to relay the facts of the
11 case that I read last night.
12 Q And they assume that about you because you're black.
13 Q I believe so, yes, since I don't see it happening non
14 black students.
15 Q Were you political at all before you got to UCLA Law
16 School?
17 A No, no, I wasn't. I always felt like I was contributing
18 to African-Americans doing better by me doing better. By --
19 you know, like I said I was in many, many situations where I
20 was the only black. And I felt like by performing well and
21 being a good person, that spoke to them, you know, all blacks
22 are not alike. We don't all think alike. We don't all look
23 alike. We don't all act alike. And -- you know, I would talk
24 to people about the fact that they hadn't been around a lot of
25 blacks before and they had different ideas and around me,
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1 changed some of their ideas. Or they would ask questions, or
2 whatever. So I always felt like I was adding just by being who
3 I was. And so I never really get engaged in any kind of
4 political activity.
5 Stanford, although there was -- there was some
6 activity about, you know, when 209 was going to hit the
7 ballot, there wasn't a lot of organized stuff on campus. And
8 I was away for one quarter, too. So I didn't get involved
9 there. And I never wanted to.
10 Again, going back -- I did not want to go to Boalt
11 because I did not want to be put in that position, you know.
12 Maybe if I was twenty-two years old and I was planning on
13 being a civil rights attorney, that would have been the
14 perfect environment for me, you know. But you know, I'm kind
15 of pass those years. And I just wanted to, you know, learn how
16 to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a corporate lawyer. So I did
17 not feel like being a political activist was going to be the
18 best route for me to incorporate all this. So, no, I was not
19 political. I was not planning on being political.
20 Q Did you find nonetheless that you had to take a stand at
21 UCLA?
22 A Definitely, definitely. You know, the fact that only two
23 enrolled made it a political situation. And when I got there,
24 the pressure's on you. I mean, there's two of you there. And
25 there are people that are upset about it other than you, and
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1 they want to do something about it. They want you to do
2 something about it. I became -- Lena and I became the poster
3 children, literally. The poster children of the effect of the
4 end of affirmative action. I would go down the hallways when
5 there were rallies and protests and see poster that said, only
6 two African-Americans. There were songs made up, only two,
7 shame on you. People were chanting about me. People were
8 making posters about me. The statistics were all around. And
9 I remember going -- you know, the first big protest that was
10 planned, the organization that was planning it was having a
11 meeting. They needed people to help make signs. Now, I'm a
12 supporter. Like I said, I didn't go there planning to lead
13 anything. I'll support, you know, but I really just wanted to
14 focus on being a law student. So I said, well, I'll come in
15 and I'll help signs. So I was there painting signs. Even
16 though some of the signs were about me, you know, only two.
17 And then they started talking about we need speakers, we need
18 student speakers. And they said, we really need you to speak,
19 we really need you to talk about, you know, what's it like for
20 you to be here. And I didn't want to do it. I hate public
21 speaking. That's why I was really nervous, and you guys know
22 that I -- some of you know I did not want to come and do this
23 because I hate public speaking. So I didn't want to do it.
24 But they really were telling me, we really -- we need you to do
25 this.
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1 And then I felt like after having the signs and
2 hearing the songs, and that I needed to let people know that
3 there are human beings behind these statistics. These only
4 two? I'm one of those only two. I'm the one who comes here
5 and it's only one of two, and I needed people to see that.
6 And so when I did my -- when I spoke, when I wrote the speech,
7 I wasn't writing it, you know, oh, the policy this. I was
8 writing about what it's like to be one of two and walk the
9 hallways.
10 I'm not from LA. I had never even been to the UCLA
11 campus before the first day that I came to the summer program.
12 So I didn't have a car. So I had a gotten an apartment. I was
13 very close to campus. I knew I could get to school every day.
14 So I walked. And one of the things I ran into shortly
15 thereafter was the fact that I needed to get my hair done
16 because I put a relaxer in my hair, and I wanted to try to
17 keep my hair, so I decided I better not do it myself. There
18 was nobody out there for me to ask where can I go get my hair
19 done? You know, that's what I wrote about. In my speech I
20 wrote, you know, to some people, that might seem really
21 insignificant, like, oh, you can't get your hair done. But
22 when you're a first-year law student, and you're going through
23 all the pressures of first year, and your confidence is being
24 beaten anyway aside -- put race aside for a moment -- you're
25 sitting in that classroom, your first -- you know,
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1 introduction to Socratic method, you're trying to figure out a
2 case, cases from the 1800s. You know, your confidence takes a
3 beating. And one of the things that you can do is at least
4 try to keep your body healthy, and keep your spirit healthy.
5 And as a black woman, your hair is really important to you.
6 So I tried to convey to them how difficult it was to even
7 think that other people walked around taking for granted at
8 that school. They can walk to downtown Westwood and get their
9 hair done at any shop down there. I can't go into any of
10 those shops and get my hair done. Not because they wouldn't
11 allow a black person in, because they don't know how to take
12 care of my hair. They don't have the products, and they don't
13 have the training to take care of my hair.
14 And I was walking around that school with basically
15 a living helmet. My hair was (indicating) and there were ends
16 sticking out. And, you know, every morning, I'm looking in
17 the mirror, and that's my first thing, oh, my God, my hair is
18 crazy. There was no one there for me to ask.
19 Lena is -- she is half African-American, and she's
20 half Latina. She has totally different hair than I have. My
21 group of friends although they're very supportive and we have
22 study groups together, they're Latina, they're Asian, they
23 don't go to a black hair salon. I just couldn't even get my
24 hair done.
25 And that's what I talked about. I talked about
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1 walking the hallways and being invisible to my classmates,
2 that they won't even say hello to me. I talked about not even
3 being able to find someone to tell me where can I get my hair
4 done, and then actually beg a ride off of them, too. So
5 that's what I spoke about. And I was really surprised by the
6 response. It really effected people. And I thought there
7 were so many other speakers there that were just great
8 speakers, and I was so nervous. I was shaking, and I remember
9 when I was done, somebody tried to hand me a glass of water,
10 and I couldn't hold the water to drink it. And I had to just
11 sit on the side for a few minutes and calm down enough to even
12 be able to drink the glass of water.
13 But after that, I had so many people send me
14 e-mails, come up to me in the hallways, you know, thank me for
15 speaking. White students, black students, Asian students,
16 everybody, faculty tell me how moving my speech was and how
17 much they appreciated it, and how much they appreciated being
18 made aware of it, you know. And up until last semester -- you
19 know, for a year, I still was getting e-mails and I remember I
20 was at a function in the library just last semester and a
21 librarian came up to me, and he said, you're the one that
22 spoke last year, aren't you? And I said, yeah. And he goes,
23 that was such a wonderful speech, I just want you to know.
24 So I don't know how or why or what, but forever
25 reason people were moved by it, and all I was talking about
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1 was my experience there as a student.
2 Q Ms. James, are you more or less conscious of race and
3 racism now than you were before?
4 A Oh, I'm definitely more conscious of it, definitely. And
5 I don't feel like I was unaware of it before. But, you know, I
6 never get away from it. I never get away from it.
7 During the first year, when I was having lots of
8 problems, and my family couldn't understand because I never
9 had problems academically before. People would say, just
10 don't deal with it, don't get involved with it, don't get
11 involved. Some people. My mom wasn't one of them. But some
12 people would say, you know, just don't get involved. And they
13 didn't understand that you cannot not be involved. When you're
14 sitting in the classroom and you're experiencing that hostile
15 environment, how do you not be involved? How do you not be
16 involved by comments that are being made? How do you not be
17 involved with the fact that the professor is only asking you
18 about facts. How do you not be involved with the fact that
19 he's going down a row and you're next, and you're getting, you
20 know, a little tense, because you're saying, oh, gosh, I'm
21 going to be on call, and then he jumps to the row behind you.
22 How do you not be involved with that? How do you not be
23 involved when your classmates are taken over to the admissions
24 office and the police, the Los Angeles police are coming to
25 your campus to drag them off in handcuffs. How do you walk
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1 away from that when they're doing it while they're chanting
2 songs about you, how do you walk away from that and say it
3 doesn't involve me, I don't have to deal with it. You never
4 get away from it.
5 So, yeah, I'm much more conscious because before I
6 came here, I was able to go to school, I was able to go to
7 work, and I was able to be Chrystal James. Yes, I was always
8 black woman, Chrystal James, but I was judged on my
9 performance whether it be academic or whether it be my work
10 performance I thought. I always felt that I was being judged
11 on that first, you know. I don't ever feel like anybody
12 didn't see me as being black, or didn't see me as being a
13 woman, but they saw me for what I was doing. And I come here,
14 and I am always -- first of all, I was one of two before
15 people knew what my name was, I was one of two. And it wasn't
16 until I decided to let you know what my name is that they even
17 knew that. But I'm always still one of the few black students
18 at UCLA, and I never get away from that.
19 Q Do you feel that there are others in the school who have
20 tried to make you feel like a poster child for the end of
21 affirmative action?
22 A Yeah, yeah. I don't know if that was their intention. I
23 think that's the fact, you know, what are going to make posters
24 about. And, you know, these people were people who were on my
25 side. These are people who want to change that. They don't
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1 want it to be that there are only two African-Americans in any
2 entering class at the law school. So their intentions I think
3 were good. But, again, it's so prevalent on that campus that
4 people don't really realize the impact of being one of two.
5 And so they're making the posters, they're making the songs, I
6 mean, this is what you do for a protest. It became that, you
7 know. It just is that. And I just was the poster child. It
8 was most -- we were just the most obvious, the impact on the
9 numbers. I mean, two, two.
10 The Native American -- I don't know -- and then that
11 person was on the posters, too. But I don't why it didn't --
12 again, I think it's just that, you know, in our history, it's
13 always been most extreme between black and white. So it tends
14 to -- lots of things tend to focus on black. So, yeah, I was
15 the poster child.
16 And it's for the administration, too. You know,
17 that they made posters or anything, but when the Dean would
18 speak, you know, the statistics always come up, and he's
19 defending the policy, he's defending the statistics. So, you
20 know, yeah, we were, we were definitely the poster children
21 for that.
22 Q And were there others who were not on your side?
23 A There are others that are not -- they don't organize and
24 they don't protest, but then they don't really have to because
25 they control the classrooms. So their strength and their power
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1 come across every day when I'm sitting in that classroom. They
2 don't need to organize and to protest. They're not the
3 minority there.
4 Q When you entered UCLA Law, did you want to pursue an MBA?
5 A I did, yeah.
6 Q If you were to decide to pursue it, would you attend a UC
7 law school -- a UC MBA Law?
8 A No.
9 Q Where would you go?
10 A Not in the UC system. No, I would not.
11 Q Thank you for bailing me out.
12 Is that because of the impact against affirmative
13 action on your education?
14 A Yes, yes, and I will not risk putting myself in this
15 situation again.
16 Q Ms. James, are you able to be an individual in this now
17 purported color blind law school?
18 A Well, I am an individual, but -- am I perceived as an
19 individual? Maybe only by my friends, but, no, I don't think
20 that, no, I don't get to just be an individual law student. I'm
21 always walking with a badge of one of two African-American
22 students in UCLA Law School. I don't -- yeah, I don't feel
23 like I get to just be an individual. I have a lot of burdens
24 that my classmates don't have.
25 Q Are you treated like you're qualified to be there?
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1 A No, no.
2 Q Do you enter the law school and feel like you have the
3 privilege of being judged as an individual today?
4 A I can't say like one hundred percent. Is it more than
5 last year? Yeah, because there were five African-Americans
6 that came in the first year. So the spotlight is off of me.
7 But, no, I still -- I mean, it's a difficult question to answer
8 because so much of what I have to do doesn't allow me to just
9 be an individual. You know, I have to continuously support my
10 first years which means, you know, having them in the bathroom
11 crying. Trying to get them to go to class and, therefore,
12 cutting their classes. I have to interact with the
13 administration over any type of racist event that happened. So,
14 no, I don't think people perceive me that way. I think people
15 perceive me as this activist now. So when I walk onto the law
16 school, I -- I don't know what the first years think, but I
17 definitely know what my own classmates in my class think of me,
18 you know, and I don't think they think of me as just an
19 individual.
20 Q What has the lost of affirmative action meant to your
21 sense of freedom?
22 A Well, to some extent it's sort of taking it away because
23 I felt when I entered law school like I had the world ahead of,
24 you know. I didn't except to go and do badly academically. So
25 I'm assuming I'm going to, I've got a great background behind
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1 me, a great undergraduate, a great work experience. The world
2 was opened for me. And now having been there, aside from
3 feeling like I was just confined to hell -- I don't even know
4 if I have any possibilities. Sure, I have some. I have some,
5 but they're very limited. They're very limited. It's very
6 restrictive now on what I'm going to be able to do in terms of
7 how I originally planned and what I would want to do. I mean,
8 certainly I can go somewhere and try to work there for ten
9 years to do something. But it's just -- it's very limited now.
10 And part of that is, is that, you know, along with your
11 confidence, losing your confidence, losing your power, you lose
12 your creativity. You have to be kind of positive to be
13 creative. There's problem solving when you're stressed, but to
14 really be creative, you have to have like a positive good
15 feeling about yourself. And I don't have that any more. And
16 so maybe I should be coming up with some other alternative
17 plans. But I'll tell you for ten years basically the plan was
18 to go to school, you know -- at some point it shifted, okay,
19 I'm going to go to law school, and I'm going to do this. But
20 at least for -- for five or six years before I went to law
21 school, the plan was go to law school, do well, go to MBA
22 school, do well, have this degree, go off and do public finance
23 in developing countries. I didn't doubt it before coming to
24 UCLA. So I didn't make a Plan B. There was only Plan A, and I
25 didn't make a Plan B. And now, I don't have a Plan B. And I
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1 don't really have the confidence and the inspiration and all of
2 that to come up with Plan B. So now I'm trying to come up with
3 Plan B.
4 But in terms of my freedom, you know, it's limited
5 in a lot of ways, a lot of ways. I don't have the freedom to
6 pursue different firms. I don't have the freedom to, you
7 know, oh, I'm going to do this journal, I'm going to do that.
8 I don't -- you don't even know all the freedoms that I don't
9 have because a lot of it was gone before I got there.
10 Q Do you feel safe on campus?
11 A Pretty much I feel safe. The only time I didn't feel
12 safe was when I to support that group first semester in making
13 the poster, they do thing called chalking which I really didn't
14 know about it. But it's just when you go to the undergraduate
15 portion and you write on the sidewalk, on the stairs, wherever
16 you can, that there's going to be a rally. And it was to let
17 the undergraduates know that there's going to be a protest at
18 this law school.
19 And so where I lived, I lived one side of campus
20 which was the opposite side of the law school. So I offered
21 to chalk on my way because I just walked to class. I said,
22 well, I'll chalk in the morning. And I was told by these
23 third-year students that, no, we don't want you out there
24 chalking, this kind of stuff by yourself. That was the only
25 time that I felt that, you know, I was maybe not -- I was in
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1 danger.
2 And later on -- I think it was in spring semester
3 last year, we had a -- AIPLSO had to get to speaker time, a
4 Black Panther who's half African-American, half Asian. So the
5 organization brought him to campus. And I sat and listened to
6 him for awhile because I had to go to class so I missed the
7 last part of it. But he was speaking about two
8 African-American students who were part of the -- towards the
9 end of the Black Panther party who were student members of it,
10 who were killed on the UCLA campus. I didn't know anything
11 about that, and they were fighting for affirmative action.
12 Probably not in the sense of what we -- you know, as we define
13 it as today, but whatever it was. And I guess they were
14 killed by two brothers who -- I don't know all the details of
15 their case, but I never heard of it before. And I remember
16 walking home that night, and it was dark, and I was walking
17 the campus and I thought about, gosh, we haven't come very
18 far. We haven't come very far that those two black students
19 were killed on that campus, and here I am one of two walking
20 home in the dark, being warned, don't chalk by yourself. You
21 know, it's what, thirty-four years, and we're almost right
22 back in the same situation again.
23 Q Have you participated in an effort to try to increase the
24 numbers of minority students?
25 A I didn't the first year. I stay away from recruiting.
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1 They ask you to do things like attend undergraduate events
2 where you can talk to students of color. They ask you to call
3 any admits and try to convince them to come to UCLA, And I
4 couldn't do it. I could not -- I could not take the risk of
5 encouraging someone to come to that campus and experience what
6 I was going through and have them drop out. I almost dropped
7 out twice. I'm a much older person. I've been through a lot
8 more. And I just couldn't -- I could not take on as my, you
9 know, my responsibility. I don't know what that would have
10 done to me, if I were to convince another black student to come
11 to that school and have them drop out. I would much rather see
12 them go to another school and succeed and become a lawyer than
13 have them come there and drop out of law school period. And I
14 don't think that was a crazy thought, because I was going to
15 drop out. Lena would have dropped out if I dropped out.
16 And so -- but at the same time, you know, I realized
17 we need to get the numbers up to change the situation. And so
18 I didn't want to harm it either. So I just stayed away from
19 it.
20 But this year when I decided to take the
21 responsibility on to be a co-chair of BLSA, I realized that
22 part of that responsibility is recruitment. So I've struggled
23 really hard this year to find a balance between -- I need to
24 encourage students of color to come here, but I also need to
25 make them aware of the situation because I don't want them to
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1 come in unarmed. And I don't want them to face the shock
2 because a good part of what happened to me first year was just
3 dealing with the shock of this, oh, my God, I am really in
4 this situation. I cannot believe it. I'm in the Eric Brooks
5 situation. It took a while for that to really sink in. But,
6 oh, my God, I'm really in this situation.
7 So, once I got over the shock, then I started
8 preparing myself to deal with it. And I want to now make sure
9 that people don't go through that. So I do. I encourage them
10 to come. You know, I want you to come. But I want you to
11 come aware and prepared because it is not easy. It is an
12 extra burden that you take on, and it can effect your GPA,
13 which can effect your future.
14 Q Have you joined a faculty committee?
15 A I have. I'm on the admissions committee.
16 Q And what have your experiences been like on this?
17 A Well, we have only met officially on -- once, last week.
18 But prior to that, because I was a member of that committee, I
19 was allowed to attend a couple of faculty meetings. And the
20 faculty was meeting regarding the approval or the rejection of
21 some changes that are being -- that were proposed by another
22 committee made up of faculty members and student members, to
23 the admissions policy. And I was able to sit in and listen to
24 the discussions go on, and I was actually there for the vote
25 even though it was a secret ballot vote. So I don't know who
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1 voted for what.
2 But -- so I was privy to having faculty feel I guess
3 more comfortable to express their true feelings about having
4 not that many minorities, and also changing the policy to
5 hopefully gain more minorities.
6 And just to make a long story short, I found myself
7 a year and a half later experiencing that same sort of emotion
8 that I experienced in my constitutional law class. And that
9 was, after hearing comments from professors saying things
10 like, what difference is it going to make to have two more
11 African-Americans? Or you know, do we really want to lower
12 our standards just to get two more blacks?
13 I found myself sitting there again, feeling like, I
14 need to speak. I need to tell them, do you want to know what
15 the difference is having two more African-Americans? Well,
16 having one more African-American for Lena meant that she
17 stayed in law school, and hopefully she'll become a lawyer,
18 and she'll be able to give her kids a better life. That's
19 what one meant to her.
20 So how anyone say what two is going to mean, you
21 know? Maybe that second person coming is going to be the
22 person that really makes it better for me, makes it easier for
23 me, makes it easier for someone else. Who knows.
24 But I felt like I needed to say something, but here
25 I am again, sitting at this table, heart is pounding,
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1 pounding, pounding. Mind is throbbing. Again, I don't hear
2 what's going on. I can't hear the continued exchange that
3 happens after that. And that another student, a white student
4 who has been very active in the organization that's fighting
5 for the repeal of SP 1 and SP 2, you know, they need to speak,
6 they need to speak. And I want to speak, but I don't that it's
7 going to do any good. And my fear is that I sat here now for
8 almost ten hours because we had to meet twice, and it's four
9 to five hours each time, listening to these faculty, number
10 one, come from the prospective that they cannot -- there would
11 not being any minority students at UCLA even now or in the
12 future that are qualified enough to meet UCLA standards.
13 So I already know where they're coming from. And I
14 know what their thoughts are about students of color. I don't
15 want to stand up and come from an emotional stand and have
16 them look at me and, go, that's exactly why we don't want to
17 get more of you in here. So that was my fear that I would
18 stand up and I would confirm the stereotype that they already
19 expressed that they were holding. And so I didn't.
20 And so I leave that meeting, and I thought I was
21 okay. I go out into the hallway and thankfully the changes --
22 the report was approved. The faculty approved it. Thank God,
23 because I don't know how I would feel if they hadn't approved
24 it. And I would have been carrying the burden, like, maybe if
25 I would have just said something. Maybe I could have swayed
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1 that one faculty member, who knows.
2 But anyways I come out into the hallway, I'm
3 relieved of the fact that it was approved. And I'm talking to
4 a professor out there, and I'm telling him about how bad I
5 feel about the fact that I didn't speak.
6 And I go into the bathroom and it just all comes
7 back. And I'm in the bathroom crying again. And I don't -- I
8 really don't -- I know I've broken down a couple of times
9 here, but I don't really cry in public very much. I try to
10 keep a very composed attitude.
11 And I come out and I go into one of my professor's
12 offices and I explain to him because I felt like he had
13 responded to that comment about what difference does it make
14 to have two more African-American students. And he said maybe
15 we need to ask African-American students on campus what
16 difference does it make. And I felt that was an invitation
17 for me to speak, but I still couldn't find the strength to do
18 it. So I went in to at least acknowledge to him, you know,
19 I'm aware of what you were doing, but I'm sorry, I couldn't do
20 it. And, again, it's this feeling guilt and shame because you
21 have people fighting, and you feel like you have to do it,
22 too. So every time you don't do it, you feel like you're
23 letting everybody down. And I just carried that with me.
24 And I couldn't believe like a year and a half later
25 I'm still feeling this. I'm still feeling it.
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1 Q We were talking about the curve earlier. Do you think
2 there's a view that prevails in the law school about the role
3 of minority students with respect to that curve?
4 A Yes, I think that the perception is that we're there to
5 fill out the bottom of the curve. And I think that the
6 admittance of minorities is tolerated to the extent that we can
7 fill out the bottom of the curve.
8 Q Have ever in your life felt racist stigma like this
9 before?
10 A No, never, never. I mean, I certainly can recognize
11 events that happened on TV, but personally experiencing it, no,
12 never.
13 Q Are you angry?
14 A Yes, I'm very angry. I'm -- it's really -- it's sad in a
15 way because there are people who have only known me since I've
16 been at UCLA. And they know me as this angry, defeated,
17 weak-feeling person. And I feel so bad -- I was such a
18 different person before I came, you know. And I tell them all
19 the time, I wish you could have known me two years ago.
20 But, yeah, I'm angry at so many different things.
21 I'm angry at a faculty that can either be -- and I think it
22 runs the spectrum from being ignorant to the environment, to
23 being, you know, I just don't care about the environment.
24 I'm angry at an administration that doesn't fully
25 commit to some of the things they're saying, you now, they're
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1 talking a good game, but they don't back up their actions.
2 I'm angry at students. I'm angry at students that
3 can sit in a classroom and ridicule people for the way that
4 they look, or for what race they are, and knowing nothing
5 about those students.
6 I'm angry with my friends because some of the things
7 that I suspected first year, my friends were talking me out of
8 it. And it's that I don't think they had bad intentions, but
9 they're young, and they don't know, and they were new to the
10 situation just like I was.
11 And I'm angry at myself. I'm angry because I didn't
12 trust my instincts. And I'm angry because I wasted so much
13 time last year, so much time blaming myself for everything
14 that was going on. So much energy. So much time and energy
15 was just wasted. And, you know, you get angry.
16 So, yes, I'm angry. All of the time, I'm angry.
17 Q Do you bring a message with you from California?
18 A I do. I had so many people that they came up to me and --
19 most importantly Lena who said, Chrystal you go there and you
20 tell them, you tell them what's like. Even now I feel like I
21 carry the burden. I carry the burden of everybody back there
22 who's fighting, who's struggling. I'm here to speak for them.
23 And I had faculty members, you know, just go and tell your
24 story, tell your story, let people know. Because one of the
25 things that we found out last year is that people aren't aware.
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1 Our own alumni did know what the numbers were. Did not know
2 the experience that Lena and I were having. And so I -- the
3 message that I bring is that it's bad, it's bad, and it needs
4 to be changed, and we need to do the right thing. The effect
5 is bad. It's bad for everyone. It's not just bad for people
6 of color. It's bad for the other students there, too. They are
7 experiencing a bad situation as well. And so, yeah, I'm hear to
8 speak for everybody in that, you know, don't let it happen
9 here. Don't let what happened in California happen here.
10 MS. MASLEY: I have no more questions.
11 THE COURT: If you can do your examination before we
12 take our break, that would be great.
13 MR. PAYTON Actually, I'm just going to thank her
14 for coming. I think that what came through besides these
15 terrible truths was enormous courage, and I think you for
16 coming.
17 THE WITNESS: Thank you.
18 THE COURT: Plaintiff have any questions?
19 MR. RICHTER: We don't have any questions, your
20 Honor.
21 THE COURT: Ms. James, thank you for coming. We
22 appreciate you coming.
23 We'll stand in recess. I have a couple of sentences.
24 We'll stand in recess.
25 (Court recessed, 11:00 a.m.)
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1 (Court reconvened, 11:35 a.m.)
2 THE COURT: Okay, next witness.
3 MS. MASSIE: We call Professor Walter Allen.
4 THE COURT: Professor Allen, please step forward to
5 be sworn in.
6 W A L T E R A L L E N ,
7 being first duly sworn by the Court to tell the truth, was
examined
8 and testified upon his oath as follows:
9 DIRECT EXAMINATION
10 BY MS. MASSIE:
11 Q Hello.
12 A Good morning.
13 Q Where do you work?
14 A I'm employed at the University of California Los Angeles,
15 in the Department of Sociology and full professor.
16 Q How long have you been at UCLA?
17 A I've been working at UCLA since 1989.
18 Q And where did you work before that?
19 A Prior to the University of California Los Angeles was I
20 employed at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
21 Q For how long?
22 A Worked at Michigan Ann Arbor from 1979, through 1989.
23 Q And how about before that?
24 A The very first job of my career was at the University of
25 North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Employed there from 1974, through
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1 1979.
2 Q Tell us what you job responsibilities for each of those
3 three institutions.
4 A Okay, at the -- I'll begin with the most recent
5 employment. University of California Los Angeles, as I've said
6 I'm a professor of Sociology, and have an affiliation with the
7 Center for African-American Studies. In that role, I teach and
8 advise both graduate and undergraduate students. I've have
9 various sundry administrative responsibilities as well.
10 At the University of Michigan, my appointment was in
11 sociology at the Center for African and African-American
12 Studies. Beginning my job at Michigan as an assistant
13 professor, and by the time I left I had been promoted to the
14 rank of full professor.
15 At Michigan, once more, the responsibilities were
16 those of a professor, teaching the undergraduate and graduate
17 students, advising, conducting my research, and fulfilling
18 various administrative responsibilities.
19 And similarly at the University of North Carolina
20 Chapel Hill, that being as I said the first job out of
21 graduate school, I worked as a professor teaching
22 undergraduates, teaching graduate students, and advising both
23 categories of students. I should say involved with the
24 advising of graduate students. That involves with those
25 students in close training and mentoring relationship,
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1 directing their MA theses, directing the Ph.D. dissertations
2 and, of course, doing related research.
3 Q What are your specialty fields?
4 A My speciality fields are sociology of education, race and
5 inequality in America sociology of the family. And I did work
6 on sociology and quality of life which focuses on health,
7 economic relationships, and what have you.
8 Q In that connection, have you done anything in that
9 connection at UCLA?
10 A In terms of the latter area? Yes, I have quite a bit,
11 actually.
12 For a time I was associate director for the Robert
13 Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program which is a national
14 highly regarded program for post-graduate training for
15 physicians where physicians come into the program and are
16 trained in research and methodology, are trained in public
17 policy with an eye toward equipping them to shape and
18 influence national health policy.
19 I've had research projects in the area, too, but I'm
20 not sure you want me to elaborate upon those.
21 Q No, that's okay.
22 If you could tell us about your -- where your
23 research has focused over the years.
24 A My research focus has been under a broad umbrella, and
25 that broad umbrella has been concerned with race, and other
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1 forms -- race and inequality in America generally. And then as
2 a consequence of undertaking such work, the focus looks --
3 brings to focus my attention on other sources of inequality in
4 this country. So I do some work on gender and the difference
5 it makes for inequality in the society. Class differences. And
6 race and ethnicity broadly and beyond a focus on
7 African-Americans which has been the core of my work, but I
8 have been drawn to focus on the status of Latinas and Latinos,
9 the status of Asian American -- and along those lines.
10 So that has been generally the substantive content
11 of my work. And the methodology has been broad and
12 multi-focused intentionally so. So my original training was
13 that of a demographer and POP studies. For persons who know
14 the area, it was highly statistical and quantitive and heavy
15 in that area.
16 And subsequently the expertise was expanded to
17 include the other research methodologies: Survey research,
18 qualitative research, engaging focus groups and life history,
19 and all with an eye in trying to understand what our
20 admittedly complex issues in this society and the admittedly
21 contrast relationships between race, status and inequality of
22 the society. And that multi-method strategy simply being one
23 who has allowed me to look at the questions from a variety of
24 prospectives because one of the methodologies provides its own
25 strength and limitations. So there are only certain answers
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1 you can get from each methodology. And I wanted to have this
2 comprehensive answer as possible so, thus, I wanted to have
3 those questions addressed and answered from the prospective of
4 aggregate statistics. I wanted to have those questions
5 addressed and answered from the prospective of survey data,
6 that is, the questionnaires that most people associate with,
7 social science based research. And further, I wanted to have
8 those questions addressed and answered from the lived
9 experiences of individuals who are in those categories. And
10 you only get that kind of information from say a focus group
11 which a group directed interview around set subjects, or from
12 a very intensive analysis of live history looking at a
13 person's trajectory over time, and understanding the range of
14 factors at various levels that shaped that person's life and
15 life outcomes.
16 Q So your work in sociology, as a group you work for
17 various publications, I understand as a dissertation
18 supervisor, and all of that, it encompasses different
19 methodologies?
20 A Very much, so, that's true.
21 Q Tell us about some of the honors you've received,
22 Professor Allen.
23 A They are, as you know, listed the CV, but I'll highlight
24 a few of them.
25 I'm a member of the Sociological Research
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1 Association. That's an elected membership to an honorary
2 association, a national association of sociologists. At any
3 given time there are fifteen to twenty thousand practicing
4 sociologists. The membership for SRA, the Sociological
5 Research Association, is restricted to one hundred and fifty
6 sociologists, living sociologists I should say. I might have
7 a tougher time getting in. You've got to live the whole
8 history of ranges. But there are a hundred and fifty of us
9 who are members, I think privileged and honored to be members,
10 to have been elected into that membership.
11 I've received citations and awards for my research
12 from the American Educational Research Association. From --
13 I've been elected president of the Association of Black
14 Sociologists.
15 I stood for the presidency of the American
16 Sociological Association which has a membership of fifteen
17 thousand. I did not win that election, but I'm fond of saying
18 I took second. Normally the way it works is that the
19 nominating committee chooses from, once again, the full range
20 of all sociologists in the country, two people to run for the
21 office. So that was an honor in and of itself.
22 Actually, would have to look at the list if I were
23 to continue to --
24 Q No, that's fine. I just wanted to get some highlights.,
25 and as you said all the rest are contained in your CV.
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1 Do you currently have any research grants?
2 A I do. I am presently co-director and listed as principal
3 investigator for a study of student access to higher education
4 in the state of California. That's a one-million dollar grant
5 from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. And what we are trying to
6 understand is pathways of success for under-represented
7 students in higher education in the state of California.
8 I also have a grant from the W. K. Kellogg
9 Foundation here in Michigan as a follow up to an evaluation of
10 their thirty-five million dollar African-American men and boys
11 in Michigan. I was part of that evaluation team and
12 co-director, and co-PI for that particular grant.
13 And essentially what we were charged to do --
14 Q What's a PI, I'm sorry.
15 A I'm sorry. Principal investigator.
16 Q Please continue.
17 A And we were called upon to just evaluate the
18 effectiveness of the various programs that were concerned with
19 improving outcomes for African-American men and boys in this
20 country. And that group having been defined and identified as
21 a group that considerable risk in all areas or various areas of
22 American life in terms of education, in terms of the criminal
23 justice system, in terms of full participating roles as
24 citizens, performing their family roles and what have you.
25 So that first piece of engagement had to do with
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1 simply looking at programs around the country, some of which
2 are quite well-known, Boys Choir of Harlem, Pinewood Country
3 Day School, and so on.
4 We completed that evaluation and then went to the
5 foundation and were successful in selling them on the idea of
6 a next step, that is, having learned these lessons about what
7 works in terms of improving outcomes for African-American
8 males, how could we now equate those procedures and put them
9 in a form where the model could be -- first of all,
10 demonstrated, and then exported to others who were interested
11 in having systematic tools for changing outcomes for
12 African-American men and boys. So those are the two major
13 projects that I currently have funded.
14 I've just completed a funded project of three
15 million plus from the National Institute on Aging that had as
16 its focus the health status of African-American elderly. And
17 most of my research in engaging with a team of scholars, each
18 of whom brought different strength, skills, and prospectives
19 to bear.
20 Q You have a number of publications. I won't take you
21 through those at great length. But your recent publications
22 are listed in your CV. You've published widely in peer review
23 journals in all of the areas you've told us were your
24 specialties; is that right?
25 A That's correct.
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1 Q Tell us about your prior testimony as an expert -- I'm
2 sorry, in other matters.
3 A My testimony previously as a court-approved expert, has
4 been largely in cases involving aspects of desegregation and
5 diversity in higher education. I came to be involved in those
6 cases by virtue of the research that I had been, and because of
7 my sort of substantive and methodological expertise. Those
8 cases include the Ayers case in Mississippi which eventually
9 made its way to the Supreme Court.
10 I have been involved with the Knight case in
11 Alabama. I have done work with the Department of Justice as a
12 court expert in Tennessee.
13 I was a court expert for the Podberesky case in
14 Maryland. And am currently working with a group of attorneys
15 in the Cotin Yada (sp) which had previously been the Rios case
16 in California.
17 Q What's that case about?
18 A The last case, Rios and later Cotin Yada versus the UC
19 Board of Regents is a case brought by those plaintiffs on
20 behalf of a class of African-American, Chicano-Latino students
21 arguing that they have been denied equal educational
22 opportunity and access as a result of the implementation of
23 Proposition 209. And Proposition 209, of course, was the
24 anti-affirmative action legislation that followed on the heels
25 of decisions by the UC Board of Regents in SP1 and 2, SP2, that
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1 essentially said -- that banned the university from continuing
2 to participate in affirmative action activities related to the
3 recruitment and admission of students of color, or students of
4 under-represented racial groups.
5 Q As an expert you said you had been retained by the DO --
6 Department of Justice, several times?
7 A Yes.
8 Q Have you worked for other parties as well?
9 A I have. In Alabama, I was actually retained by Alabama
10 A&M University. And the Podberesky case, I was retained by the
11 state of Maryland and the University of Maryland. Retained in
12 one instance by a private plaintiff in the Garrett case in
13 California where a scholar successfully sued Clairmont Colleges
14 for racial discrimination in his tenure case.
15 MS. MASSIE: Judge, I would ask that Professor Allen
16 be certified by the Court as an expert in race and education?
17 THE COURT: I would imagine no one has any objection
18 to that. Plaintiff?
19 MR. KOLBO: We have no objection at all. We may
20 have some as questions come up, your Honor.
21 THE COURT: Oh, I understand. As to his
22 qualifications, we'll certainly accept him as an expert.
23 BY MS. MASSIE:
24 Q Professor Allen, I'm going to start by asking you to tell
25 us about findings in research that's been done broadly over the
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1 last couple of decades on race and higher education. It's a
2 very, very broad topic. I would like to start by asking you
3 about research that's been by you and also by other people on
4 the status of black students in higher education.
5 A As you point there is a sizeable body of research on the
6 status of black students in higher education, their outcome in
7 higher education, and related questions. And I have been able
8 to contribute the literature.
9 Broadly the findings have been as follows: First,
10 that research and those research findings conducted in various
11 settings, conducted over time, conducted using multiple
12 methodology by a wide range of researchers has been consistent
13 in its demonstration of a persistent under-representation of
14 African-American students in US higher education, historical
15 and chronic under-representation if you will. Further that
16 research has in many of its aspects demonstrated that
17 African-American students on historically white campuses,
18 predominantly white campuses, report experiences of those
19 campuses as being racially hostile, as being environments that
20 communicated to them that they were interlopers, or aliens or
21 not welcomed on the campuses.
22 So this research has demonstrated that many of the
23 -- has demonstrated that the connection between the chronic
24 under-representation of black students on these campuses and
25 in higher education nationally is very much tied up in a set
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1 of structural-interpersonal barriers that confront these
2 students in those instances where they are either trying to
3 apply for application to the school, or they're trying to
4 successfully complete their educational program after having
5 been admitted to schools, or they're trying to further their
6 education after having successfully graduated, and have
7 desires to onto the graduate and professional school.
8 So what comes through very clearly is a picture of
9 the educational experiences for African-American students as
10 being deprived, and as being disadvantaged in the early K
11 through 12 years that predict who goes onto higher education
12 in the subsequent years in terms of the experiences of those
13 students after they move into the undergraduate years, and
14 after they move into graduate and professional school.
15 A corollary area of research has made comparisons
16 between the experiences of black students at predominantly
17 white schools and on historically black colleges and
18 universities. And that research demonstrates very decided
19 differences in terms of the experiences that black students
20 report from the campuses and, indeed, in terms of their
21 academic outcomes. And that research explicitly ties those
22 differences back to differences in the levels of hostility and
23 support on predominantly white campuses which tend to be very
24 minimal versus the situation on historically black campuses
25 and universities.
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1 So in a nutshell what we see is a troubled history
2 of African-American students in higher education in terms of
3 access, and in terms of success. And the literature
4 demonstrates conclusively, persuasively, definitely, that
5 those negative outcomes are larger than and are not explained
6 by simple attribution to personal failure, or lack of personal
7 motivation because consistently what we see is students who
8 are defeated, who are discouraged not by virtue of a personal
9 failing, or lack of motivation of lack of sufficient
10 intelligence, but rather by structures and habits some of
11 which are more covert and actually I've come to understand as
12 being unconscious, but nevertheless devastating for those
13 students in the sense of just saying to them you don't belong
14 here, you're not competent, and then translating very often
15 into behaviours aimed at fulfilling that prophecy on the parts
16 of people in positions of power, professor, administrators and
17 fellow students.
18 Q In aggregate quantitative terms what's the impact of the
19 phenomenon you're describing on black college students?
20 A In very aggregate quantitative terms the impact is one
21 that translates into a diminishment of black representation,
22 some black under-representation in higher education, and lower
23 levels of success in terms of the -- and often lower levels of
24 success in terms of the accepted indicators of academic
25 success. And that would be grades, and the test score
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1 performance and what have you.
2 Q How about graduation rates?
3 A Graduation rates as well, yes.
4 Q Have there been changes over the course of your career
5 and over the course -- when people have been researching this
6 area, have there been changes in race of access and success to
7 your --
8 A Very definitely so. I co-authored a book with a
9 colleague Ralph Farley at the University of Michigan were we
10 simply looked at the status of African-Americans in American
11 society, and looking at the country as a whole using census
12 data from 1980. And the conclusion in that book which was
13 titled, "Race and the Quality of Life in America," was a very
14 simple one, that, indeed, there had been progress in terms of
15 the status of African-Americans in this country. But that
16 ultimately that progress was too little and too late and, in
17 fact, served mostly to highlight how much further there still
18 was to go in order to create a situation of equality between
19 the races in this country.
20 Now, that's the general backdrop. When we look at
21 the pattern of black participation in higher education in this
22 country, what we see are ebbs and flows. We see these high
23 points and these low ones. And those high points are very
24 much tied to moments when the country determined that this was
25 wrong, it was unfair, and then the resources and a social will
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1 and commitment were brought to bear with an eye toward
2 improving the circumstances of black Americans and other
3 groups educationally, but any improvements for
4 African-Americans had very clear repercussions and advantages
5 for other groups.
6 So at that critical moment, by the way, that brought
7 me into higher education when Johnson declared his "great
8 society," when the society made available resources for
9 funding the continued education of people like myself from the
10 projects in Kansas City, Missouri. But there was money
11 available. There was a national will very much in place that
12 said we are going to create these opportunities. We are going
13 to go out and find individuals who have the promise and the
14 will, and the ability to take advantage of them, and will we
15 support those individuals.
16 So that was the high point. And at that high point
17 you look at the numbers from the University of California, you
18 look at the numbers from the University of Michigan, they were
19 just incredible. I mean they were just an incredible powerful
20 reputation of that previous era that said, well, we can't find
21 people, they're not available, they're not qualified. And at
22 that moment when the institutional will shifted and resources
23 were available, all of sudden there was just an explosion, a
24 literal explosion of opportunity.
25 And what we saw as a consequence was an increase, a
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1 dramatic increase in the numbers of African-Americans,
2 Chicano-Latinos, women who were admitted to higher education
3 and who were successful.
4 We then hit a point of diminishment or low points
5 where -- and I consider this moment being a similar one where
6 those very mechanisms that had long since proven themselves
7 effective and successful are now being dismantled or being
8 challenged because the suggestion that somehow were no longer
9 needed which is definitely not true, or that they didn't work,
10 which is definitely not true. I'm living evidence that those
11 programs of equal opportunity and affirmative action work.
12 And needless to say they don't work by creating a situation
13 where unqualified individuals earn degrees. They simply work
14 by challenging the system to go beyond its standard procedure
15 of selecting only among those who are already privileged, but
16 rather opening -- insisting that the gates be opened wider,
17 that opportunities be given to individuals who have not had
18 those opportunities before. But ultimately those individuals
19 have to do the work in the classroom. They have to perform in
20 their occupation.
21 So that's a -- I'm sorry a long-winded answer, but
22 the long and short of it is that what we've seen is these
23 peaks and valleys. And there are many scholars who relate the
24 peaks and valleys to economic change in the society because
25 the society was challenged in terms of stereotypic notions of
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1 African-Americans, and the threat of African-Americans being
2 on equal footing and on an equal basis.
3 And historically, you look at the work of any number
4 of historians, James Anderson, an educational historian shows
5 us in the area of education. George Fredickson, a historian
6 more, generally, wrote a journal and they showed it in terms
7 of a society as a whole. But the point is that the society
8 has a tendency and whites in particular that when things are
9 going back, economical, when they're feeling insecure,
10 inevitably it spells bad news for people of color because the
11 fact of the matter is that the tradition of the society has
12 been one historically where the notion of equal competition
13 and being of equal status with blacks was problematic. And so
14 whenever there is a situation of scarcity or self-sense of
15 scarcity, then we have a situation where the clock was turned
16 back.
17 Q Let me take you back for a second to your comment about
18 comparisons between black students on largely white campuses
19 and black students on historically black campuses. Tell us what
20 the benefits and downsize of being on an integrated or
21 partially integrated campus are for black students, if you
22 would.
23 A I began to focus on such a comparison because I was
24 confronted by a puzzle. And the puzzle quite simply was one
25 that took the form of two groups of students who both appeared
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1 to be very promising and sure far bets for graduation and
2 success occupationally. So one group of students was a group
3 of African-American students who decided to HBCU, and another
4 set of students was a group of students who decided to go to
5 predominantly white universities and colleges. And the puzzle
6 developed for the simple fact that these students who often had
7 similar profiles, almost down to the last detail, in fact, had
8 dramatically different outcomes in those two settings, in a
9 predominately white setting versus a predominately black
10 setting. The bottom line is that those students who went to
11 predominantly black institutions did better academically. They
12 felt better about themselves. They had better outcomes
13 compared to their peer students at the predominantly white
14 schools. And it was even more striking once I began to delve
15 into the questions and very often the students who attended the
16 predominantly white campuses, those black students who attended
17 predominantly white schools were better off economical. They
18 have in many respects more solid academic credentials and yet
19 they had worse academic outcomes.
20 So it led quite naturally to a question of well
21 what's going on in these two environments to explain or
22 account these different, these radically outcomes for
23 population of students who are very similar by all the
24 standard measures of qualification.
25 And the answer to that came forward in the series of
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1 studies that we have done on those campuses, studies using, as
2 I said, aggregate statistics, that is, institutional records,
3 census data, studying using survey data, and studies where I
4 simply would conduct focus groups and very intensive
5 interviews with these students.
6 What came through quite clearly was the fact that in
7 one instance in those -- at those HBCUs, at those historically
8 black colleges and universities the students an environment
9 that was more supportive, that was friendlier, that felt that
10 they could success and basically facilitated them the
11 attainment of excellence. And by the way, that brought them
12 eventually to a point where they could then go on, and when
13 they left those schools, it wasn't that they had the kind of
14 education that couldn't be applied elsewhere, they left those
15 schools and went to successful careers at the leading graduate
16 and professional programs around the country and into the
17 various occupations themselves and excelled.
18 So this is compared this compared with a situation
19 in white schools, where I talked to those students. They
20 talked about feelings of isolation. They talked about
21 feelings of being treated as aliens. They talked about
22 situations where the presumption was that they weren't
23 qualified, and the actions of many people ostensibly enrolled
24 to support and facilitate them were quite the contrary. They
25 were really actions that undercut those students in terms of
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1 their confidence. Undercut them in terms of their success.
2 Undercut them in terms of their opportunities.
3 So those were the lessons that emerged. Now the
4 long and short of it is when you compare HBCUs to
5 predominately institutions in this country, it's just amazing
6 HBCUs overproduce in terms of their proportion of the three
7 thousand plus schools of higher education in this country.
8 They were producing -- HCBUs' produced twenty-five, thirty
9 percent of all graduating BAs who are black in any given year.
10 And so those lessons continued to motivate the
11 research that I'm in the midst of literally trying to figure
12 the good things about HBCUs, and translate those lessons to
13 predominately white schools. And similarly those things that
14 are positive of white schools in terms of the preparation of
15 African-American students to translate those back to HBCUs.
16 Q That's exactly what I was going to ask you next. What is
17 any of the advantages for black students going to partially
18 integrated predominately white schools? Is it all downside, or
19 is there any upside?
20 A There are many upsides. For one thing, in higher
21 education as in many areas of life you have these prestige
22 hierarchies. So to complete one's education at a Stanford or
23 Harvard, or the University of Michigan is to automatically be
24 in rarified air and to have several opportunities opened for
25 you that are reserved for the most exclusive -- a small set of
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1 exclusive individuals in the society. Similarly, those schools
2 are better resource. They're better resource in terms of just
3 the hard the physical resources, the availability of computers,
4 the sort of facilities in terms of the science labs. And they
5 further are advantaged in terms of the qualifications,
6 preparations, and backgrounds of their faculty. So they have
7 all of these kinds of advantages that are just a function of
8 being a prestigious leading institution in the country.
9 Now, the downside for African-American students is
10 that often they are not able to take full advantage of these
11 opportunities. And when I say for African-American students,
12 for students of color, I mean more generally especially for
13 Chicano-Latino students. Those advantages -- so you're in
14 this rich environment, but by virtue of how you are perceived
15 and how you experience, many of those advantages are beyond
16 your reach, and you cannot benefit fully from them.
17 Contrast that with the historically a black college
18 and university. Those students feel a part of that -- of
19 those institutions. They are validated, they are appreciated.
20 They don't begin with the assumption and having to disprove
21 the assumption that they are not qualified, that they have bad
22 value, they have bad work ethnic, that they had bad
23 educational preparation.
24 In fact, it translates into a simple example. In
25 one setting, the HCBUs, a student may reveal a shortcoming or
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1 a deficit, but it's perceived as correctable. It's perceived
2 as aspects of that individual's educational preparation that
3 was not addressed, but it can be, and should be, and will be
4 addressed.
5 By contrast when you look at the data and you talk t
6 the students in the setting of a predominantly white
7 institution to reveal such a deficit is to be viewed very
8 often as fatally flawed, uneducable, totally beyond repair.
9 So it becomes a very difficult situation because needless to
10 say there is not a person who comes into any institution who
11 does not have some areas of weakness in his or her background,
12 preparation or skills and expertise. So it's a matter of how
13 it's responded to in the two settings.
14 Q Why is it different for a black student than it is for a
15 white student on a mostly white campus to come up against the
16 limitation or weakness --
17 A Because of the fact that we have a sad history around
18 race in this society and that sad history is very much present
19 with us in terms of associates about the inherent inbred
20 biological inferiority of African-Americans of -- people of
21 color more generally. And so that expression takes many forms.
22 I mean, it, has by the way evolved over time, too. I mean you
23 find very few people who will talk about innate biological
24 inferiority.
25 Now, it's not say that there are scholars who still
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1 go back to that old song. As recently as a few years ago, the
2 Bell curve resurrected and those of us who study the history
3 of intellectual racism see again those ebbs and flows where
4 those biological explanations will rare ugly heads and serve
5 as a justification for preserving this racial hierarchy of
6 white over black, and white over people of color.
7 So you see in that kind of a pattern a tendency to
8 assume the worse about a black student who demonstrates any
9 kind of lack of preparation. And paradoxically as you look
10 into the research we've done, you find that paradoxically it's
11 a Catch-22. So those black students who can survive and
12 prevail over the extreme odds that presume them to be
13 incompetent even that becomes a negative because then it's
14 communicated to you that, well, you're not a regular black
15 person because my stereotypic construction says that a regular
16 black person could not do this well, so you must be something
17 other than a regular black person. You're not like, quote,
18 unquote, you're not like the rest of them.
19 And so you have a situation where these students are
20 simply put not being treated fairly. They are not being given
21 a fair shot and it translates into the kinds of negative
22 outcomes that differentiate historically black college
23 environments from predominantly white college environments for
24 students.
25 Q If I understood you earlier seventy-five to eighty
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1 percent of black college graduates, graduate from largely white
2 institutions.
3 A Twenty-five percent to thirty percent of the total in any
4 year of black students come from black schools, so, yes.
5 There's a bulk of black graduates in any given year come from
6 the remaining three thousand institutions in this country, most
7 of them -- all of which are majority white.
8 Q As you know, one of the questions that is being tried
9 here has to do with GPA and whether it's a neutral measure of
10 achievement and merit. Tell us your opinion about the
11 implications of what you've said so far today for that
12 question.
13 A I think definitely GPA is not a neutral measure of merit.
14 I'm a professor. I know that grading is an art form. And it's
15 particularly an art form when you -- it's more of an art than a
16 science particularly when you move outside the hardest areas of
17 the curriculum. The "hardest" being not most difficult, but in
18 terms of being most quantitative.
19 So the science art equation is let's say more
20 science over in the hard science, the physics, the chemistry.
21 But even then there's an element of art because we have to use
22 our judgment, and we have to make decisions around the
23 arbitrary cut point.And I think it is often in those instances
24 where all other things being considered equal, the world view
25 that a professor brings to the table will influence how he or
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1 she evaluates a student's performance, and knowing that
2 student's race, or knowing that student's ethnicity, or
3 gender, or even social class.
4 Q Does the environment at the white campuses -- excuse me,
5 mostly white campuses you've studied, have any implications for
6 aggregate GPAs?
7 A Absolutely. I mean so, as I've said, under the
8 hypothetical situation where everything is equal, even there
9 grades are not necessarily going to be assigned fairly or
10 equitably to students of different race.
11 When you look at the broader set of environmental
12 circumstances it becomes even mor complicated. It becomes
13 even more powerfully evident that race matters in terms of the
14 grades that students will earn.
15 As I listened to the testimony of Connie Escobar,
16 the testimony of Chrystal James, those sort of lived case
17 examples linked up with evidence from our focus groups, linked
18 up with evidence with the survey research I've undertaken, to
19 demonstrate conclusively that features in the college
20 environment in terms of just established practices and
21 structural relationships and interpersonal relationships have
22 a diminishing effect, if you will, on the educational outcomes
23 for black students, on the GPAs of black students.
24 And I know it's starting to get fuzzy so let me give
25 you a couple of examples, if I could.
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1 Out of a focus group comes the example of an
2 African-American student who takes a quiz in calculus I think
3 it was, and earned a grade of ninety-five. That student is
4 called into the professor's office. And, of course, he's
5 excited because he thinks that professor is going to
6 congratulate him on his stellar performance. Instead, he's
7 confronted with the charge or the question of whether he
8 cheated on the examination. And the only evidence of his
9 having cheated on the exam which is in mathematics was that he
10 did much better than African-American students can be expected
11 to do given established stereotypes.
12 Now fortunately in this case, this student had the
13 kind of psychological fortitude that allowed him to move into
14 the retest situation and he was required to take this exam
15 again, and under the direct supervision and surveillance of
16 the TA, and bless his heart, this student scored a
17 ninety-eight the next time around.
18 My voice quivers because very few human beings can
19 respond that way. And more often than not, the response is
20 one not of such a positive outcome, but rather it is one that
21 demoralizes that student, that leaves that student in a
22 situation of saying, what's the use, I have played by the
23 rules, I performed at an excellent standard, and still I
24 cannot outrun this mythology, this stereotype that presents me
25 as educationally and intellectually incompetent.
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1 So we have examples like that. We have further
2 examples in our law school setting where one's performance is
3 not solely based on how you perform in the written exam, but
4 those written exams and final grades are adjusted based on
5 explicit incorporation of the professor's impression and
6 evaluation. And just the despair that comes forward from a
7 young woman that says well how am I going to get a full
8 hearing, when I've been in this class for a semester, along
9 with two or three other black women, I have taken this
10 professor to lunch as is the custom in law school to get to
11 know him, paid good money for this man's food, and this man
12 still doesn't know me, can't differentiate or distinguish from
13 the other three black women in the classroom. So periodically
14 we each wear one another's names. And, yet, this individual
15 has to sit down with my papers, with only my name, and make a
16 judgment about whether and how my performance should be -- how
17 my final grades -- my grades should adjusted to reflect my
18 performance, and he could not pick me out of a lineup.
19 So you get instance, after instance, after instance
20 of that kind of experience. And the cumulative effect quite
21 frankly is one diminishing academic performance. And it
22 diminishes academic performance.
23 What I try to do is to demonstrate that it
24 diminishes academic performance at several levels. It creates
25 psychological crises, and we know that individuals -- I mean,
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1 human development teaches us. That's another area that I did
2 a lot of work on, psychology of the family, and socialization.
3 And kids thrive in safe, supportive environments. Those are
4 the environments where their development is maximized.
5 And similarly with adults. We still are social
6 beings so we need positive feedback. We need support, and we
7 must circle in these to have the sense that we will be treated
8 fairly. And when people are in this situation where they
9 can't feel this to be so, psychologically they're damaged.
10 They're psychologically in terms of interpersonal
11 relationships. And, again, the evidence there. You read
12 through and people simply withdraw because it is stressful and
13 tiring to confront, day-after-day, the stereotypes, the small
14 slurs, the small negative remarks which by the way is an area
15 of study that informed our research, refers to as racial
16 microaggressive. Those are aggressive actions aimed at
17 reestablishing or reaffirming the racial hierarchy.
18 And so when people make these sly, small comments, I
19 guess they could be dismissed by someone as, oh, one comment.
20 But you have to be -- remember that you're already in an
21 extreme minority. So if twenty folks make those small
22 comments that day, you've had twenty assaults, multiplied by
23 whatever number of days per week, and by whatever number of
24 weeks per semester.
25 So the long and short of it is that many students
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1 simply withdraw, they cease to interact. They try to figure
2 out ways as human beings do to protect themselves, to preserve
3 themselves. And one of the things you often will do with
4 unpleasant situations is you avoid them, you avoid them. And
5 certainly avoidance in terms of school can be a hurt, a fatal,
6 potentially fatal adjustment as far as your grade is concerned
7 if and is often the case your grade is probably predicated
8 upon your level of participation in the class.
9 So you're in a class one among a sea of white faces.
10 And after some point you are tied up with just preserving
11 yourself psychological, and trying to avoid struggles and
12 strains, but it has a consequence for your educational
13 performance. And it really has a consequence for your
14 learning because the learning is very much tied up in
15 interaction, and exchanges, and developing arguments. But one
16 has to have to safe space in those kinds of encounters to be
17 positive rather than the negative.
18 Q And are you speaking now both of the work that you've
19 done over the course of your career and the work on this case,
20 or one of the other, or --
21 A I'm sorry. I'm talking about the -- more specifically
22 when we look at the survey research that I've conducted over my
23 career, and I have two major data sets that are worth noting.
24 A study of black students on sixteen campuses nationally. And
25 the studied population consisted of five thousand plus students
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1 in all levels of school, professional years, graduate school,
2 and undergraduate school. And, indeed, those students, a
3 portion of them I follow over time. But in those campuses, are
4 predominantly white campuses and in those campuses were
5 historically black campuses.
6 There was a second study of some three thousand
7 undergraduates of all races and obviously it had gender
8 variation in each of the data sets in the upper midwest
9 looking at students' experiences on different types of
10 campuses, that is, a private research campus, a public
11 research university, a small liberal arts college, and so on.
12 And out of those surveys and the aggregate findings
13 of my work, of the work of Astin, of the work of any number of
14 scholars who study these questions have come very clear
15 indications of, for example, that black students feel higher
16 levels of isolation than do white students. Black students
17 more often consider dropping out of school than do white
18 students.
19 And by the way I say "as" as a correlator, but very
20 often they don't differ from those white students in terms of
21 their academic backgrounds, or their level of academic
22 performance. But where they are differing is just in terms of
23 their sociopsychological responses to those campuses and the
24 dispair and disengagement and alienation that the campuses
25 create for them. And so those items out of the surveys also
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1 show that the students are less socially connected. They feel
2 more alienated. They talk about their relationships with
3 faculty members and literally in those aggregate statistics we
4 see that the black students have poor, more problematic
5 relationships with their predominantly white faculty. I mean,
6 we have a battery of questions that have developed and evolved
7 over the years, borrowed from people, constructed by us.
8 But that shows, for example, that white faculty has
9 problems relating to black students. And, in fact, at times
10 avoid interacting with those black students. Or further that
11 they will often give those black students -- as one student
12 described it in the focus group, "get out of my face" type
13 answers. Very short answers that essentially did not serve
14 those students and that communicated to those students that
15 they were lesser beings than the white student who either was
16 in front of them and spoke with same professor or behind them
17 and spoke with the same professor, and received a dramatically
18 different reception and response.
19 I can't help but make a connection to Ms. James'
20 testimony and it links up with a finding out of a focus group
21 where -- the focus group research conducted at the University
22 of Michigan where two black females students had gone in for
23 assistance and the professor palmed them off on a fellow
24 student, and turned his back to his computer. I don't know
25 what it is about us professors and our computers, but that in
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1 and of itself may be worth a study, but literally what it
2 translated into was just not some dealing with the needs of
3 those young women and dismissing them and sending a very
4 powerful message that they were not worth his time or his
5 fulfilling his assigned duties of teaching all students in
6 that institution.
7 So the findings that I'm quoting from are drawn from
8 both -- from all the bodies of research that I've been engaged
9 in, the large scale surveys, my reading of the literature, but
10 also my research is more qualitative and more focused.
11 Q Some of which was carried out for this case; correct?
12 A Absolutely.
13 Q Tell us about the work you did for this case.
14 A Okay. I have a philosophy when I serve as a court
15 expert, first and foremost of conducting first-hand empirical
16 research, specific to the questions in the case. That's not --
17 basically it's intended to provide -- from my prospective, to
18 build up on the work that I've already been doing as a scholar
19 of sociology of education, but to bring to bear some specific
20 details of the case at hand.
21 Now the particular research project that I executed
22 was based up on an involved a case study method that I've
23 developed over the twenty-five years plus that I've been doing
24 this kind of research. And it's a comprehensive approach,
25 self-consciously comprehensive in a sense that I draw data. I
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1 make a point of -- first, of all assembling a team of experts
2 across the areas of substantive and methodological need. And
3 there has to be a historical component to the study because
4 the fact of the matter is that the present is very much rooted
5 in, effected by, shaped by history and particularly when you
6 talk about race because history is very much present. So that
7 was a component, to identify a historian of education, and to
8 literally look at the history of the University of Michigan
9 and the University of Michigan in the terms of the college and
10 the law school, around questions of race, and the status of
11 African-Americans, just that long historical review that
12 provided the context for the nix aspects of the study.
13 And the more immediate empirical aspects of the
14 study were in the following components: Analysis of African
15 statistics from the University. The University has, for
16 example, an incredibly detailed retention file which maintains
17 records and information on all students who enter the
18 University to the point of separation, whether they graduate
19 or they transfer, or for whatever reason that they separate.
20 So aggregate analysis of that data set was a
21 component, supplemented by survey data. Now survey data are
22 more of a middle range strategy. That is the kind of
23 questionnaires where you can ask individuals, a large group of
24 individuals questions that have been scientifically developed
25 to get at the issues of interest. And those people respond to
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1 those questions, and you ask -- basically you build in several
2 strategies so you can be sure you are getting accurate
3 responses. You ask, for example, the same questions several
4 ways. And you ask other questions that are related and will
5 confirm that evidence.
6 So survey data both from my earlier national studies
7 because by the way the University of Michigan has been a
8 participating campus in the national study of black college
9 students, a study of five thousand plus black students that
10 has been ongoing since 1981. And then I supplemented those
11 survey data with additional survey data collected in this
12 year.
13 Now, from April to May - I should say in last year
14 -- April to May of 2000, we collected survey data, conducted
15 focus groups, and conducted intensive life histories, and took
16 some interviews and life histories with selected students at
17 the University of Michigan Law School. But understanding that
18 the University of Michigan Law School in many ways is linked
19 to the feeder undergraduate institutions that is those major
20 schools that provide the members of the entering class a
21 further need to look at student experiences prior to, as well
22 as during, or after their entry at the University of Michigan
23 Law School.
24 So I'm making it very complex, but essentially the
25 elements were a multi-level data collection, a historical
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1 component, a demographic component, survey research, focus
2 groups, and life histories. And then in terms of the locus or
3 the places of the study, looking primarily at the University
4 of Michigan Law School, but knowing that such a focus would
5 not be adequate in and of itself, so also looking at selected
6 undergraduate institutions that over the years have been among
7 the top ten schools providing undergrad BAs who moved into the
8 University of Michigan Law School. So those four
9 undergraduate institutions were the University of Michigan
10 College, LS&A; Michigan State; Harvard University, and the
11 University of California Berkeley. So that in a nutshell is
12 the design that we used for this research.
13 Q How did you identify those four campuses?
14 A We basically identified the four campuses based on a list
15 provided the University of -- produced by the University of
16 Michigan Law School, that for successive years showed the
17 breakdowns of the entering class in terms of the undergraduate
18 institutions of origin. And those schools were, in each year,
19 in the top four -- I'm sorry, the top ten undergraduate
20 colleges or origin for the incoming class to the University of
21 Michigan Law School.
22 Q So your work on the case was a particular example of
23 stuff you've done before.
24 A Yes, very much so.
25 Q Questions of access, academic performance, et cetera, but
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1 focusing on the law school on one hand, particularly in the
2 feeder schools; is that a fair summary?
3 A That's correct.
4 Q Tell us about your team.
5 A The team consisted of really an outstanding group of
6 scholars. Professor James Anderson, historian of education at
7 the University of Illinois. Champaine Urbana was the historian
8 of education and did the historical study.
9 The research team that gathered survey and focus
10 group data was once more just a distinguished group of
11 colleagues, Professor Daniel Solorzano, graduate school of
12 education and information studies at UCLA has just done
13 extensive work on questions of race, ethnicity, inequity in K
14 through 12 education and higher education. Professor Grace
15 Carroll similarly has done extensive work on those topics and
16 worked for a time in college admissions and college academics
17 support. Those were the three main Ph.D. level members of the
18 team. And they were supplemented by graduate students about
19 five to seven graduate students each of whom was a master's,
20 held a BMA and was currently in the midst of a doctorate, a
21 program of doctoral study at the University California Los
22 Angeles.
23 There were a few other supplemental -- or
24 contributing, I should say researchers that -- a couple of
25 whom actually held Ph.D.s.
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1 So the long and short of it is that we had a very
2 talented team of committed scholars who were willing to work
3 cheap, but still produced quality and excellent work.
4 MS. MASSIE: Judge Friedman, this is actually a good
5 time to take a lunch break.
6 THE COURT: No problem. Two fifteen, we'll
7 reconvene.
8 MS. MASSIE: Judge, I'm sorry, can I raise one other
9 thing. I forgot to move into evidence Jay Rosner's original
10 and supplemental expert reports and also the exhibits we used
11 yesterday. Mr. Rosner is still here so I don't know if there
12 will be any questions --
13 THE COURT: Any objections?
14 MR. KOLBO: Well, your Honor, we will object to the
15 extent that the report we believe contains opinions that we
16 were objecting to on foundational grounds, particularly with
17 respect to test design, psychometric, psychology of testing.
18 I feel I need to preserve that objection.
19 THE COURT: Over that objection with the
20 understanding that I'm going to determine the weight, we'll
21 receive those exhibits.
22 MS. MASSIE: Thanks, Judge.
23 THE COURT: Anything else?
24 MS. MASSIE: No.
25 THE COURT: Okay. See you all after lunch.
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