US students spark racism row with bake sale
AFP
LOS ANGELES- A California students' group has sparked a racism and sexism row over plans for a bake sale in which people are charged according to their ethnic background and gender.
Campus Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley say critics have overreacted to their event planned for this week, which they insist is a protest over affirmative action.
The group's Facebook page lists the price of baked goods at the sale according to race: $2 for whites, $1.50 for Asians, $1 for Hispanics, $0.75 for blacks and $0.25 for Native Americans.
"$0.25 FOR ALL WOMEN!" it added.
Campus Republican President Shawn Lewis said the idea of the "Increase Diversity Bake Sale" was to highlight a legislative bill to let California public universities consider race and gender in their admissions process.
He said they planned to go ahead with the sale on Tuesday despite protests and threats. "We didn't expect the volume, the amount of response that we got," he told CNN.
"In the first few hours, hundreds of posts on our Facebook page. And the tone of some of the responses -- we expected people to be upset. We didn't expect personal threats to be made.
"They were implicit and explicit threats made to the organizers of the event, from burning down the table to throwing our baked goods at us and other kinds of physical threats."
But the famous US college's student Democrats president Anais LaVoie has asked for an apology.
"The way they made the statement, the words that they used, the fact that they humorized and mocked the struggles of people of color on this campus is very disgusting to me," LaVoie said, cited by ABC television.
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"$0.25 FOR ALL WOMEN!" it added.
Campus Republican President Shawn Lewis said the idea of the "Increase Diversity Bake Sale" was to highlight a legislative bill to let California public universities consider race and gender in their admissions process.
He said they planned to go ahead with the sale on Tuesday despite protests and threats. "We didn't expect the volume, the amount of response that we got," he told CNN.
"In the first few hours, hundreds of posts on our Facebook page. And the tone of some of the responses -- we expected people to be upset. We didn't expect personal threats to be made.
"They were implicit and explicit threats made to the organizers of the event, from burning down the table to throwing our baked goods at us and other kinds of physical threats."
But the famous US college's student Democrats president Anais LaVoie has asked for an apology.
"The way they made the statement, the words that they used, the fact that they humorized and mocked the struggles of people of color on this campus is very disgusting to me," LaVoie said, cited by ABC television.
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