(Re)-Education: Shock Value
April 06, 2004
Several weeks after the public demonstrations calling attention to institutionalized racism and its impact on the Columbia community, the dialogue on race and racism on campus has dwindled, particularly among those not actively involved in the ongoing negotiations with the administration. This silence, while predictable given the amnesia that midterms and spring break annually induce, is a shame. Among the people for whom the conversation about race was newest and most crucial, it has stopped before it started. This is not to say that everyone responded to the silent protest by seriously engaging the issues that organizers were raising. Leaving the demonstration one afternoon, I heard one student say to another, “Not this bullshit again,” while walking past. Earlier in the week, as I was getting my mail in Lerner, I overheard a student saying, “If they don’t get that this was just a joke, they really aren’t smart enough to be here.” It was this attitude of dismissiveness—sadly, neither new nor surprising—that principally motivated my own involvement in the demonstrations. Not to make a habit of quoting James Baldwin—though as habits go, it’s better than most of my other ones—but here, once again: “It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.” What is most troubling about the still unfinished conversation about race on this campus is the repeated denial of the problem, the continued insistence that no one was responsible for or obligated to address people’s anger and injury if it didn’t resonate with them.
From my perspective—and I speak only for myself, not in any official capacity—although the silent protest derived a great deal of energy from public incidents like the CCCC bake sale, Orgo Night, and The Fed cartoon, it was ultimately about much more. Frustration among marginalized segments of the student body has been present for quite some time. Many students of color at Columbia do not and never have felt that they are equal members of the university community. The frequency of ignorant and racist comments, challenges to their very right to attend the university, and neglect by university officials who write off most of these complaints have led to feelings of alienation and anger among students of color that are easily awakened by events like these, even when they are framed as satire.
We do not all enter the university on equal footing; we cannot pretend we are united enough or familiar enough to mock each other and pretend it is “all in the family.” Rather, we deal daily with manifestations of privilege, in classrooms, on our syllabi, and in our public spaces, and when we attempt to confront them we are generally greeted with the glib rhetoric of diversity and tolerance that assumes slogans are enough, and ultimately insists upon its own innocence while dismissing criticism as emotional or irrational.
At a point when I was spending a great deal of time thinking and talking about these issues, a friend interjected, “I’m not saying that you’re not right, but aren’t there more important things to worry about?” During that time I was also watching and re-watching war documentaries for my thesis. Certainly, while looking at explosions and dismembered bodies flicker across the television screen, it was at times hard for me not to see this action, like most other campus action, as somewhat trivial.
However, while watching people our age describe explosions or battles as “just like in the movies,” and then return to fight them, I was struck by the casual acquiescence to the perpetual inevitability of hostility, even when its result was death. It was a dismissive attitude not entirely unrelated to the attitude exhibited on our own campus—the attitude that some people’s anger can be written off, that some conversations about difference cannot or need not be entertained, that we will engage certain people only when shocked into thinking about them, and will do so only from the perspective that we are innocent victims of their naïve or willfully malevolent irrationality.
As someone who will be leaving Columbia in a little over a month, and already feels very little attachment to it, I certainly understand that there is a world bigger than what lies within these gates. However, at the risk of falling into the trap of “the left is always conflating separate issues, and thereby confusing them,” I continue to believe that if Columbia University graduates people who are unwilling or unable to tolerate a critique of their campus, who believe change to be impossible, and who are able to ignore or ridicule the injuries of their classmates and deny their own responsibility in creating them, it is graduating irresponsible world citizens.
I hope that negotiations on the proposal submitted by student organizers result in serious commitments on the part of the University, but also that, regardless of administrative action, students are willing to finish uncomfortable conversations and be troubled by the stress and distress of their fellow students. We must all take responsibility for the problems in our own community—of which racial privilege is only one—even if treating them as serious problems implicates all of us.
