UC Berkeley Dems to frame GOP as racist during Tuesday's debate

Student Democrats at the University of California (UC), Berkeley announced Sunday that they would be hosting a live tweeting event during next week’s Fox Business Republican debate, during which they will point out alleged racism displayed by the presidential candidates.

The event was created by a “working group” from a course called “Law Race and Public Policy,” and will be hosted at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School by the Cal Berkeley Democrats in collaboration with the ASUC Office of Summayah Din, a student senator who sparked controversy earlier this year by using the hashtag #Dintifada, a pun on her last name and the word “intifada,” which has associations with Palestinian terrorism.

"[W]e encourage everyone to remember that the strategic use of racism to get votes is a practice engaged in by Democrats and Republicans alike. We are centering this event around the Republican debate because of the documented history of the party using racism quite intentionally as a fundamental part of their strategy," the event description goes on to say, referencing a link to a list of Salon magazine articles tagged with the phrase "dog whistle politics."

"A race conscious electorate needs to be just as skeptical of Democrats as well."

The event will feature a “mass live-tweeting campaign” targeting the “racist tropes used by the Presidential [sic] candidates and making voters more aware of how racism is being used in politics so we, as voters and members of a community, can consciously push back against it.”

The College Republicans released a statement condemning the event and asking for it to be cancelled.

“This event is being framed as independent but from all appearances is actually a partisan attack on Republican presidential candidates, funded and supported by taxpayer and student tuition dollars,” the statement read.

Kerida Moates, the president at UC Berkeley’s College Republicans, said that the event is clearly an attack towards Republicans, a minority group on campus.

The Bruin Republicans, a college Republican group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), expressed their support for the Berkeley Republicans on Facebook, saying that “all too often liberal groups hide partisanship behind the title of an ‘independent event.’”

Haley Nieves, a second year political science and international development studies student at UCLA and outreach director of the Bruin Republicans, told Campus Reform that she thinks the event “perpetuates unfair stereotypes about Republicans and adds to the polarized and disjoint nature of American politics.”

Nieves said that hastily generalizing a group of people such as Republicans as racist is not helpful in bringing “constructive bipartisan discourse” to campus, and does not help alleviate racism in any way whatsoever.

Neither Din nor the Cal Berkeley Democrats responded to Campus Reform’s request for comment in time for publication.

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