Reflecting on the media circus surrounding her testimony at Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, Anita Hill noted, “It was as if I had no race.” Thomas’ characterization of the hearings as a “high-tech lynching,” and the implication of racial discrimination, pitted race against gender. As a result, Hill’s harrowing experience of longtime sexual harassment was neatly and emphatically erased.

Now at UC Berkeley, we have a new charge of “high-tech lynching”: Sujit Choudhry, ex-dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, has sued the university for racial discrimination as a person who is “of South Asian descent.” Again, racial discrimination has been invoked in an 11th-hour defense of masculine power. Again, a Black woman’s race has been erased. Again, a legal battle is being waged on a Black woman’s body.

As South Asian feminists, students and alumni of UC Berkeley, we refuse to accept this attempt to marginalize the testimony of a survivor. We refuse to see systemic racism against South Asian Americans perverted into a convenient defense of sexual violence.

People of South Asian descent occupy a particular place in the U.S. racial order and are ourselves very diverse. While people of Indian descent, the group to which Choudhry belongs, are the highest-income ethnic group in the U.S. and are heavily represented among the faculty at elite universities such as UC Berkeley, many South Asian Americans are targeted by post-9/11 Islamophobia, racial profiling and xenophobic violence — in addition to sexism, queerphobia, classism and casteism within our communities.

At the same time, our “model minority” status has repeatedly been used to justify anti-Black racism in the U.S., and anti-Black racism is rampant within our own communities. Given this position, we must remain precise and critical when we talk about racial discrimination. The struggle against racism against South Asian Americans should not serve to displace struggles against anti-Black racism and sexism. Choudhry’s claims of racial discrimination ignore these intersections. He wielded his position as a tenured, highly paid, South Asian male dean over Tyann Sorrell in private, and now he claims to occupy a shared position of racial subordination with her in public.

The administration’s failure to address instances of sexual assault over decades remains outrageous. Time and again, protection of tenured faculty members’ careers is elevated above the careers and welfare of other employees at UC Berkeley who have less power. And yet, this failure does not validate Choudhry’s actions. Choudhry is not the ultimate scapegoat: Both Choudhry and the administration are trying to teach each other a lesson. The victim was and remains to be Tyann Sorrell, and it is with her that we stand in solidarity.

The group of South Asian Feminists includes current students and alumni of UC Berkeley. They are as follows:

Gowri Vijayakumar, Alum, UCB Sociology ’16, Assistant Professor, Brandeis University

Tara Gonsalves, Ph.D. Candidate, UCB Sociology

Sridevi Prasad, Alum, UCB Molecular and Cell Biology B.A. ’15, Program Assistant, Institute for South Asia Studies at UCB

Harsha Mallajosyula, Alumni, UCB Goldman School of Public Policy, Class of 2015

Neeta Pal, Alum, Berkeley Law

Aditi Pradhan, Alum, UC Berkeley

Karin Shankar, Alum, UCB Performance Studies ’16, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Barnali Ghosh, Alum, UC Berkeley, Class of 2001

Anirvan Chatterjee, Alum, UC Berkeley, Class of 1998

Sheena Paul, ASUC Senator Fall 2015-Spring 2016

Sumayyah Din, UCB Undergraduate

Shivani Narang, UCB Undergraduate

Sagaree Jain, UCB Undergraduate, Co-Director, South Asians for Social Justice

Anisha Chemmachel, UCB Undergraduate

Sameer Nayak, UCB Undergraduate

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Alum, UCB Rhetoric, Assistant Professor, University of Nevada

Rishita Apsani, J.D. Candidate, Berkeley Law

Henna Kaushal, Alum, UC Berkeley

Swati Rayasam, MS, UCB School of Public Health

Saba Ahmed, Alum, B.A. ’07, J.D. ’14

Michaeljit Sandhu, Ph.D. Candidate, UCB Sociology

Anoop Jain, DrPH ,UC Berkeley

Anvi Bahl, UCB Undergraduate

Varsha Venkatasubraman, B.A., History, Berkeley ’16

Jasleen Kaur Singh, Berkeley Law

Mariam Azhar, Berkeley Law, 2019

Nira Pandya, Berkeley Law, 2019

Bilal Malik, Berkeley Law 2017

Sarah Mirza, Berkeley Law 2018

Seema Rupani, Berkeley Law 2017

Nirali Jani, UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education