Sunday Soundoff: Cancel Culture, Transit Equity, & Love vs. Hate

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — Jewish though I am, I am not oblivious to some of the teachings in Christian Scriptures.  In particular, I found myself thinking last Sunday about the advice Jesus was reported to have given when asked if a woman caught in the act of adultery should be stoned.  According to John 8:7, King James’ version, his advice was “He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her.”

The reason that advice came to mind was that I read a comprehensive article by Gary Robbins in the San Diego Union-Tribune about the decision at Cal State San Marcos to remove the name of the late state Sen. Bill Craven (R-Oceanside) from Craven Hall, Craven Circle, and Craven Road because of what his critics said was a pattern of racism against Hispanics.

During a 1993 committee hearing, Craven reportedly described migrant workers as being “perhaps on the lower scale of humanity for one reason or another” – a comment which he later described as a malaprop.  He had meant to say on the lower economic scale of humanity.  Additionally, he backed a proposal to require Californians to carry state ID cards to prove that they were legal residents – which critics said was his way of targeting undocumented migrants.  He said it would provide documentation for federal assistance.

Craven now has been “cancelled” by the unforgiving academic community. The irony of this is that were it not for Bill Craven, Cal State San Marcos would not have existed in the first place.  He fought the uphill legislative battle to win approval for the construction of that campus. Opponents noted that San Diego County already had San Diego State University, whereas other parts of the state didn’t have even one state university campus, much less two, in addition to a campus of the University of California.

Through charm—of which he had plenty—and solid research, Craven eventually persuaded his colleagues that a college in San Marcos would help an underserved population. Today, according to Robbins’ story, approximately one-half the university’s enrollment is Hispanic.  So, the very people in whose name Craven is being condemned are important beneficiaries of his hard-fought legislative struggle.

In my days as a politics writer for The San Diego Union (1972-1980), I covered Craven both in his role as a county supervisor and later as a state legislator.  I knew him as a Republican who worked in bipartisan fashion with the Democrats.  Reading the above-quoted statement he made in 1993 shocked me because I had never seen any evidence that he, nor his wife Mimi, nor his daughter Tricia Craven Worley, harbored prejudice against any group of people.  From my observation, he was a very kind man.  In the Union-Tribune article, his daughter asked “Have you never said something you wish you had said another way?”

She asked a good and very relevant question.  I know I have said things that upon further examination, I wish I hadn’t.  I bet that faculty members at Cal State San Marcos at one time or another in their lives have also said some things they wished they could have recalled or rephrased.

Merryl Goldberg, a music professor who once made headlines as a member of the Klezmer Conservancy Band that met with dissidents in the Soviet Union, said familiarizing herself with the transcript of the controversial committee meeting, was a gut punch.  “I really asked myself , ‘What do we do when this kind of rhetoric becomes public?’  We don’t let it slide.”

I understand and sympathize with the umbrage that the Hispanic community takes over Craven’s discriminatory, racist, utterance. I believe that Craven should be called out – but not culled out – for phrasing himself in such a way that an odious sentiment like that appeared on the public record.  I also agree that Craven should have apologized for that remark, which apparently he never did, although he did try to explain what he meant.

When we assess people’s overall records, shouldn’t we weigh their positive contributions against whatever negative words they may have uttered?  I believe the amount of good Craven did for our community—and all its people, Hispanics very much included–far outweighs his negatives.  Canceling him is unjust.

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The North County Transit District should be applauded for its decision that provided free rides to consumers yesterday, Saturday, February 4, the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ birth in 1913.  Called a recognition of “Transit Equity Day,” the free rides celebrated the refusal of Parks, an African-American, on December 1, 1955, to surrender her seat in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus so that a White person could sit there.

Arrested, Parks, who was then secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, declined to pay a fine of $10 (and another $4 for court costs).  The president of her NAACP chapter, E.D. Nixon, helped her appeal her conviction, while meanwhile the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a successful boycott of the bus company that lasted 381 days.  Eventually, the court case worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which decided in November 1956 that segregated buses were unconstitutional.

Public awareness programs such as this one conducted by the North County Transit District are a dynamic way to teach U.S. history and to further the cause of racial equity.

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The San Diego Union-Tribune on Monday, January 30, detailed acts of prejudice and hatred against three groups of people: African-Americans who were spurned and bullied in Coronado in the 1920s and 1930s because they were descended from slaves;  Japanese-Americans who were forcibly interned in inhospitable camps during World War II, and Jewish Americans whose synagogue in Bloomfield, New Jersey, last Sunday was the target of a Molotov cocktail that fortunately did no damage.

Reassuringly, the same newspaper edition described a new program called “the Welcome Corps” sponsored by the Biden administration that seeks to pair legally admitted refugees with American families who want to be of assistance to the newcomers.

I was pleased to learn that Marty Block, a former state legislator from San Diego, who is Jewish, cosponsored with a Japanese-American legislator, Warren Furutani, legislation establishing January 30th in California as Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.

In an OpEd piece, Kay Ochi, president of the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego, reported that after the measure was signed into law in 2010 by then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, our state officially recognized and commended Korematsu.  He had resisted the order to report to a World War II internment camp, and subsequently was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned at the Topaz incarceration camp in Utah.  Hearing an appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944 sided with the government against Korematsu, but in 1983 his conviction was overturned based on the government having suppressed key evidence.  During World War II, the courts did not hear contemporaneous assessments by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and various military authorities that Japanese Americans indeed posed no threat to the United States.

That California recognized the injustice of incarcerating thousands of innocent people was another reassurance that American society is not dominated by haters.

Now, a commission initiated by California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, in the San Diegan’s former capacity as a state legislator, is meeting to determine what reparations would be appropriate for African-Americans who suffered oppression as a result of being descended from Black people who lived during the era of slavery.  Whatever the commission recommends will be certain to be controversial.  I hope that a majority of Californians will demonstrate loving natures and support some appropriate recompense for our fellow citizens.

It’s up to all of us to assure that love triumphs over hate.

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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com