Shut Up and End Racism
By J.D. Porter
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 12, 2007 If you’ve been following the last few years of Columbia bias incidents, you’ve learned that racism is bad, and that we should do something about it. Unfortunately, even though we keep saying that, racism just doesn’t seem to be going away. More and more I’m beginning to suspect that we non-racists may have to abandon our empty rhetoric and form an actual plan.
The most recent spate of race incidents began with the discovery of racist graffiti in a School of International and Public Affairs bathroom. Despite being crude, offensive, and asinine, this was no ordinary bathroom stall message. Or rather, that’s exactly what it was, but it was on Columbia property, and we believe that a world-class university should have a greater level of intellectual discourse than you find on the walls over truck-stop urinals. Outraged, I looked to my student leaders, whoever they may be, and quickly learned that I had no choice but to start a dialogue. “How do you feel about racism in campus bathrooms?” I asked, and long conversations ensued. I felt that I was really opening channels of communication, forcing the administration to engage with student voices, and creating an atmosphere of open exchange where everyone could feel safe.
Unfortunately, just as the dialogue really seemed to be getting concrete results, someone hung a noose over Professor Madonna Constantine’s door, an actually newsworthy act of racism. Had all our talking about things really done so little?
Dismayed, I once again looked to our student leaders for guidance. Nearly every one of them agreed: we needed to band together and speak out. The speaking out was easy, since we had already started a dialogue. All we had to do was add signs and shouting. Banding together was a little trickier, since Columbians often follow the global trend of hanging out with people who are like themselves. Fortunately, when we sense a lack of diversity, we instinctively congregate near Low library to create it for a while. As a result, we united the hell out of ourselves, enabling us to achieve even greater volume as we spoke out. And then, at the very moment of our greatest banded togetherness, I read on Bwog that someone found anti-Semitic graffiti in a bathroom stall in Lewisohn. All that standing in the same place and saying things didn’t even prevent someone from writing things on a wall again.
My first reaction to the Lewisohn incident was to wonder why someone didn’t just erase the graffiti. Or, following typical bathroom writing protocol, we could have noted that the person who wrote it has a small penis. Either way, concern about the graffiti wasn’t going to help us do anything. We’ve been concerned about all kinds of race incidents over the past few years, but they just keep happening. This is largely because no one, student leader or otherwise, ever suggests anything substantive as a reaction. None of the rhetoric I’ve read this semester has included anything like an actual policy suggestion. Instead we call for dialogue and unity, which allows us to clarify our dislike of racism without actually having to do anything about it. It’s like starting a Facebook group about Darfur and calling it a day, because, after all, you’ve taken a stand.
A big part of the problem is that we keep treating the symptoms instead of the disease, and that’s not going to work. We already have policies against hate crimes, but criminals tend not to care what your policies say. As columnist Christien Tompkins ably pointed out yesterday, the real issue isn’t just graffiti or a noose: it’s a campus culture that allows them. We’re all a part of an institution that has Grinch-level hatred of the locals, except that instead of learning to love the Whos, we’re going to kick poor minorities out of their homes. We’ve also got a Core Curriculum that prioritizes all non-Western cultures as worthy of an A and B course; everything I know about India and China, I learned in classes about Latin American literature and Caribbean music. Until we can take care of this stuff, we’ve got bigger problems than idiots who take markers into the men’s room.
We might find it easier to solve those problems if we paid attention to them instead of constantly shouting empty rhetoric about pointless nonsense. We’ve spent years reacting to issues that, in the context of a noose hanging over a black professor’s door, seem kind of stupid. One of the biggest protests in recent history started because of a cartoon and a bake sale. Our outrage over real problems might be more convincing if we don’t waste so much of it talking about bathroom stalls.
I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like for a minority student to encounter idiocy and hate in any form, cartoon or otherwise, and solving Columbia’s broader racial problems is going to take more than the minimal discipline we’ll need to pick our battles. But, and here’s one substantive suggestion, we can start by acknowledging that the noose is not just part of some continuum of Columbia racism. It’s different and it’s worse, and it’s stupid to pretend that some idiot in a bathroom is comparable.
From there, I don’t have the expertise to say what we should do, but many of our angriest protesters do. As examples, try suggesting specific courses to add to the Core (American Racial History seems like a viable title), or specific ways to deal with expansion (adding a Columbia-run school for community children, maybe), or ways to make our demographics better reflect America’s (better financial aid for the poorest students is a start). Numerous smart students go to Columbia, many of whom know a lot more about this stuff than I do, and we need to be hearing more of their voices. The administration has learned to wait out our dialogues and solidarity circles. Let’s take advantage of their embarrassment to make them do something. And let’s make sure we know beforehand what that is.