One question that constantly perturbs me with regards to
student activism is the ability to form coalitions on some issues even if there
are deep disagrements between different aspects of the coalition that is being
formed. A clear case on campus was the recent protest that was held in response
to a student being tasered on campus. I fundamentally believe that combatting
police brutality is important. Standing up for community control of the police
is important. What happened on Last saturday was tragic, avoidable and cruel.
But I also believe that choosing to combat police brutality with the slogan
#fratlivesmatter is beyond ignorant of the way in which privilege is
constructed in society. White fraternity boys are not systematically
disenfranchised and subject to undue scrutiny by the police, black people are.
White fraternity boys aren't assumed to be criminal, black people are.
I believe that any conversation about police brutality, in
Tuscaloosa or nationally, has to understand that while brutality is an issue
that affects us all, we are not all affected equally. But this put me at odds
with activism that was being done last week in response to the police
brutality. There were two independent protests that were being organized, one
by independent and progressive students who I usually take to be “woke” and
organizing the protests for the right reasons; the other protest was being
organized by Alliance which is the public watchdog group founded this year by
the Machine to have a more transparent and public presence, and organized the
protest for all the wrong reasons, attempting to generate a media firestorm around
the slogans #alllivesmatter and #fratlivesmatter. This seemed like a simple
choice – choose the independent protest that included persons of color and wasn’t
endorsed by an organization that perpetuates institutionalized racism on campus
and around the state. But this seemingly
easy choice became a lot more complicated when both groups decided to merge their
protests and hold one unified front against police brutality.
Should I
have chosen to align myself with the larger movement, even though I know many
of the protesters didn’t have the best interest of the persons most affected by
police brutality in mind, or should I have chosen to abstain from the movement
even through it represented the peak of student activism on the issue? I ended
up choosing not to participate in that protest because I found myself unable to
reconcile the idea that I would be a part of a protest where we would see
postitive messages like #blacklivesmatter when they are diluted by standing
side by side with messages like #alllivesmatter? I found that it was very
important to me that the reasons given by protestors were ones that would make
a population affected by the issue feel unsafe or not protected in that space,
which seemed to me to be the whole point of the protest. Thankfully, there was
an independent sit-in organized by students of color the next day that I felt
much more comfortable with, that didn’t allow the machine to participate and
firmly organized in response to the issues going on at Mizzou and Yale and
focused not just on police brutality but on issues that affect black students
and students of color more generally.
I find this
to be a very difficult problem to solve however that usually doesn’t have such
a clean and easy solution. I think that the reasons that motivate a movement
are important because the reasons we care about something shape our response to
that problem, which is why it totally misses the point to say #alllivesmatter
in response to #blacklivesmatter because saying totally misunderstands how privilege
is constructed in society. So this commitment to care about the reasons that we
use to justify our actions, and not simply our ability to unite around some
issues that end up affecting even privileged groups in society. By giving way
on reasons that motivate a movement, truly important messages face being
co-opted by a dominant norm in society and fail to actually challenge a norm in
civil society. This seems like a high minded opinion, because at some point –
any visibility is good, right? Actually the continual, ever present, and
insidious ability for civil society to co-opt movements like the one discussed
motivates a lot of afro-pessmist literature that makes the claim that “There is
something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction
of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute
dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and
therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic
interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior
partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons”
(Wilderson)”.
Even if you, like I do, reject the fundamental notion of
afro-pessimism, that blackness is ontological and unchanging, the viability of
this position, even within academic spaces, helps to explain the continual
problem of co-opt within acitivism and the importance of operating through
politics of secrecy, fugitivity and disruption, not through the channels that
sanitize and whiten a movement.
(Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
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