In the past few weeks, UC Berkeley was launched into the national spotlight when video surfaced of there being "anti-white" protests on campus, promoting the so-called new wave of segregation. Within hours, thousands of unaffiliated people flocked to UC Berkeley's Facebook page to voice their anger. Within days, the campus's 4.8/5 rating to a 3.5/5 before the campus decided to remove the ability to rate the campus.

I write this article to advocate for Cal as I'm not seeing too many articles telling the other side of the story on what happened here on our campus. Internally, most students are in agreement that what information is currently out there is factually incorrect, and I hope this article will provide the same insight we have as a student body.

Before we take a look at the protests at UC Berkeley, there is a necessity to address the concepts of protests, for example, the myth that the Civil Rights Movement brought people together across racial boundaries.

On Protests

Protests are meant to inconvenience.

What I find ever so fascinating is how many people will say things akin to "I support protests, but I don't like how they inconvenience me", which is contradictory. Protests are non-violent acts that gain power from disrupting the flow of normal day operations. Whether people view that interruption as negative or positive, is irrelevant since the end result usually has people and the media talking about what occurred. It puts the issue that protesters are fighting for in a larger spotlight.

The Civil Rights Movement is more divisive than the social movements of today, including Black Lives Matter.

Gallup performed a poll back in the 1960s to see people's sentiments on the Civil Rights Movement. The results have been visualized in the graphs below.

The statistics may come as shocking to many as it did to me some time ago, but it very much is interesting to see that America generally looks unfavorably on protests in the "now", but canonizes them as time passes.

The Myths Around the UC Berkeley "Anti-White" Protests.

If you haven't already, here is the video cited in much of the press.

(Source: Diego Reyes)

Students of color were allowed through the barrier, while White students were not.

This seems to be what most people are upset about, but this statement is incorrect.

“The students of color (were) actually trying to join the line in support — people just didn’t know what they were looking at. We turned away everyone who came, no matter what race or ethnicity they were … except for people with disabilities.- Jerry Javier, Board Member

In the video, there are students moving through the barrier, but those individuals are either joining the protest, disabled or are the organizers/photographers as Javier makes clear.

The Daily Cal also reported that "campus spokesperson Adam Ratliff, [and other] campus representatives have examined the situation and have spoken with eyewitnesses, including police officers, and determined that race did not play a role in the protesters’ interactions with people who attempted to pass through.

You can also see that protesters were blocking everyone. If you look closely in the video, you will see that both white AND non-white students are crossing the creek (around 59 sec.). If they only let people of color through, why would this be the case?

Whether you know it or not, the titles of many of these articles are doing something psychology calls "priming", a cognitive nudge, where even the slightest, inconclusive piece of evidence will solidify an unwarranted belief. This plays into what is known as confirmation bias where once people have a belief, they will only "see" what they want to see to validate their beliefs. Doing a quick search, here are some of the titles of articles that are priming readers to hate on the protesters (note the language in bold):

Video: UC-Berkeley Protesters Built a Human Wall to Violently Stop White Students from Crossing Bridge

from Crossing Bridge Racist UC-Berkeley Protesters Build Human Wall to Block Whites from Crossing Bridge

from Crossing Bridge Left-Wing Berkeley Protesters Demand ‘Spaces of Color’, Harass White Students Trying to Pass

Trying to Pass UC Berkeley Students Go FULL RACIST, Attack White Only Students !

! UC Berkeley ‘identity’ groups protest for safe spaces, block passage to white students

How UC Berkeley Caved to Campus Bullies

The protest was violent.

As implied or explicitly stated in the titles of the articles above, people think the protest was violent. This is also factually incorrect.The organizers ensured participants would not initiate in any violent acts, which was clearly fulfilled. The violent acts that did occur were by the students (both white and non-white, but mostly male) who tried to get themselves through the barrier. One protester, told me how a man kept trying to hurt the protesters by running into them with his scooter, over and over again. To blame the protesters for the violent actions of people like the one on the scooter is a classic example of the "just-world" cognitive bias (aka victim-blaming). Instead of saying the protesters deserved the violence for their actions, we should be censuring the people who inflicted the violence upon them.

The protest was to create "safe spaces" on campus for LGBTQ students and students of color.

This is incorrect. Students at no point were looking to create safe spaces on campus. This was a lie created by sensationalist media to garner views and incite rage among the general public. Rather, these two organizations (Fight4SpacesofColor and Fight4QueerAndTransSpaces) sought more accessible, extended physical facilities for the bridges Multicultural Resource Center and the Queer Alliance Resource Center (QARC) since they serve thousands of students. They already have facilities, but they were in the rat-infested crumbling, basement of a newly renovated building, in one of the most hard-to-find locations--I was a orientation leader and have been here for four years and even I found it hard to find them. This is especially worsened by the fact that previous to the renovation, these organizations had larger, and better equipped facilities. A rational person would be outraged if they were shafted of previously available resources and spaces with no ability to voice their concerns, too. Don't you think?

The protest inconvenienced the people who were trying to get to class, by making them cut through a terrible, muddy creek.

Students know the protocol. Protests on campus happen frequently enough that students know the alternative ways to get to class, and there are MANY. Just off the top of my head, students could access the other side of campus through six alternative routes shown below.

The green indicates all the alternative routes students could have taken to cross over the other side of campus. 4 of 6 which are paved roads/bridges.

Did you notice in the video that any of the people crossing the stream looked viscerally enraged? I didn't. In fact there's a few people smiling, taking pictures for their Snapchat stories or just going about their day. Many of us-- the moderate majority-- understand that there is a need for protests like this for issues that are bigger than one person. Which brings me to how extremes are being represented on the video. Notice the cherry-picking going on in the video? It's not a continuous live stream video-- it's curated with the purpose to paint the students one way and to promote a politically twisted message that these protesters are terrible, violent people, rather than they are student who are tired of not being heard and want change. If you were at the protest, you would know that the vast majority of students did not care to try to break through the wall, they just simply walked around it, but instead you see what the extreme people are doing rather than what the moderate majority is because unfortunately, it makes for a better news story.

Students take more time to get to class, but the difference is about thirty seconds to a few minutes. But rationally think about it-- why would someone be willing to risk hurting others or themselves by trying to ram through a barrier of protesters when they can spend at most two minutes to walk around it? The students who attempt to do this are evidently entitled and this is something wrong with them, not the protesters. After all, UC Berkeley is owned by a public entity, and people are allowed to exercise their free speech by protesting.

Race salience plays a huge role in the outrage against UC Berkeley.

The race of who was affected impacts who will be enraged. A famous psychology study by Eberhardt and colleagues found that white people were more likely to give the death penalty to black (and "blacker") perpetrators if they committed a crime against a white victim than a black victim. Their reasoning was that race was cognitively more salient because the victim came from the same group as their white participants.

There are many protests that happen on UC Berkeley's campus, and in fact a bunch of innocent students were accidentally gassed in the building I was an RA for 2 years ago, but there was no public outrage for that. So then why was this protest put on the national stage? It unfortunately is because of the misleading titles that make the white students come off as victims, which enrages white folks because of how race is more salient to them. This is the unfortunate truth of the matter that people only cared to make a big deal about this not because of the so-called "racism" involved, but because of the "racism" towards white people.

Closing Thoughts

The key takeaway is to be critical of the single story you hear in the news and even in your workplace. Failure to question why a single narrative exists puts us at risk of critically misunderstanding an issue such as the "anti-white" protest occurring at UC Berkeley. I'll leave you with this video:

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Kunal has volunteered at an elephant and rhino orphanage in Kenya, was a nationally ranked video game player, and has taught a university accredited class on Mean Girls. Currently, he is the founder of a research based non-profit, and a student at UC Berkeley double majoring in rhetoric and psychology. He enjoys writing about the intersection of people, business, and psychology. You can follow him on Twitter (@KunalKerai) or send him any wonderful insights you may have to kunal@berkeley.edu.

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