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On Nov. 15, 2006, protesters, some clad in “got black students?” T-shirts, protest th

Makibaka! Huwag matakot!

Unless you’re fluent in Tagalog, the language endemic to the Philippines, you probably didn’t know that phrase means, “Dare to struggle! Do not be afraid!”

UCLA students used this chant last quarter while protesting the flagging UCLA admission rates of certain minority groups. Ironically, those were protests that few students joined.

Using a chant that few students could understand belies a larger problem with activism on campus: Groups that appear to be exclusively ethnic advocate for the issues that need the most attention. When activist movements appear to be racially charged, students who do not identify strongly with a specific ethnicity are alienated.

In the new year, student leaders can do a better job of appealing to a diverse student body by packaging their issues in colorless paper. Think of it as a marketing issue.

Let’s compare two issues: the Taser incident in Powell Library and diversity.

Three days after an Iranian American student was zapped by university police, students from the Muslim Students Association and other groups organized a protest to call for an independent investigation of the incident.

Before the protest, the issue was racially charged. The victim planned to sue the police for racial profiling, and students were quick to defend, or attack, his claims. But there was a feeling among many students that the issue should not be about race but rather about police conduct. Had the protest been tinged with the rhetoric of “discrimination” and “racist pigs,” those students would have been turned off.

But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. The activists who spoke at the protest, although many of them hailed from ethnic student groups, refrained from even mentioning race. They ended up getting their investigation and winning over the campus.

The issue of diversity, though, hasn’t had so much success. Far fewer students attended the pro-diversity “Day of Reckoning” rally than attended the Taser rally.

Further, the students who did attend were almost uniformly Chicano, black or Pacific Islander, indicating that larger ethnic groups on campus – such as white, Chinese and Middle Eastern students – didn’t feel much solidarity with the movement.

Given the nature of the cause, it’s not surprising that the underrepresented were overrepresented at the protest.

But in order for diversity to really gather momentum, as did the Taser investigation or divestment from Darfur, activists must do a better job of appealing to the broader campus.

“We want to focus on not fighting over pieces of the pie, but making the pie bigger,” said Lucero Chavez, director of campus organizing and a fourth-year American literature and culture and Chicana/o studies student.

But with T-shirts that say, “got black students?” as a key publicity tool for diversity on campus, it seems as though underrepresented groups are just trying to increase the size of the darker slice of the pie.

Here’s how activists can fix their image:

• Play up the benefits of a diverse campus for all students. White and Asian students can make themselves more cosmopolitan by learning from students of different ethnic backgrounds. The T-shirts could read, “Got milk? Sure, but what good is it without chocolate?”

• Emphasize how academic outreach programs help all ethnic groups. Activists are requesting $33 million from UC Regents for programs to help students from poor schools get into UCLA. These programs benefit all races. Take the Early Academic Outreach Program, for instance. It helps students in more than 350 high schools with tutoring and college admittance. Twenty-one percent of those students are white and Asian.

• Tone down the rhetoric and militancy. With most students concerned more about their GPAs than social justice, the days of sit-ins and clenched fists are over, and the regents know it. They’ll be much more convinced by a sensible proposal coming from the entire campus than by a polyglot of ethnic groups with banners, rhetoric and a megaphone.

We do need more diversity at UCLA. Likewise, we need affirmative-action-style policies in order to help end racial inequality in our country. But without the support of everyone, we’ll never get them implemented.

While some students are underrepresented here, this campus is pretty diverse. If one wants to mobilize the diverse range of white, Asian, black and Chicano students, one must appeal to each one of them. If all campus activists take this idea to heart, they’ll gain broader support for their causes. Doing so sounds to me like one hell of a New Year’s resolution.

Got a resolution for your student group? E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.