The Goodspeed Update

Alex Moffett, vice president of the NAACP, said BAMN tokenized and presented black students in a bad light when it bused in hundreds of black middle- and high-school students from Detroit for the Thursday rally on the Diag.

During the rally against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a proposal that could ban the use of affirmative action by the University and the state if it is approved by voters next year, the Detroit students were given microphones and could be heard yelling profanities and slurs at anti-affirmative action protesters at the back of the crowd. Moffett said the students came across as uneducated about affirmative action and faulted BAMN for putting them under the spotlight without preparation.

“Some of them didn’t even know why they were there — they were just there as tokens, so people would see a large number of black students,� Moffett said. “(BAMN was) just perpetuating untruths about young black students. As a community, we find that totally unacceptable.�

> Michigan Daily: “NAACP slams BAMN“