So I've been experiencing a series of frustrations this week. I'll begin by warning you all that this post may be alienating or upsetting or even offensive, but if nothing else it's from the heart. This is how my super liberal self feels.
I attend an elite private university in California. I am about to graduate from the least prestigious of its academic programs, the college of arts and humanities. Which really has nothing to do with what I'm about to talk about. I could have posted about this last Monday, but I think it's literally taken me all week to process what happened and how I felt about it, and it hasn't even directly impacted me. On Saturday night a group of students hosted a house party several blocks north of campus in a perfectly respectable and safe neighborhood in our city. These students happened to be Black. A noise complaint was called in to LAPD (instead of campus police) and two officers came to break up the party. They ushered students out of the house and as the crowd began to surround them in their stream of compliance it appears that theses officers of the law felt unsafe and called for back up.
And back up came.
Back up came in the form of over 70 police officers in riot gear. Back up came in 6 student arrests. Back up came in pepper spray, hate speech, and one of the clearest cases of racial profiling I've lived through. (The white party across the street barely received a second glance). By the end of the night, black was not just something these students happened to be. It was a costly and uncompromising barrier between these students and the undergraduate experience allowed to so many of their classmates.
The shameful component of all of this is how the administration responded. In that they didn't. They didn't support their students, defend their students, or listen to their students. They didn't host an open forum until several days after the incident, and to call the event an open forum is severely misleading. I suppose the business model of this university leaves me disappointed but not necessarily surprised by this lack of response.
Students rallied around the events, pivoting the trauma into an impetus for change. Well...probably about 1500 students did that. This university has 16,000 undergrads.
I think the part of all of this that broke my heart, that challenged my faith in humanity, is how many students remained distant, silent, or disinterested. I have yet to meet a person who is for resegregation or who proudly espouses White superiority (probably because of the uber liberal circles I run in), but it is disappointing to me that 1600 of our generation's alleged brightest minds can't see how racial profiling and unchallenged police brutality are simply the next phase in socially justified segregation. When steryotypes become actions they quickly become habits and policies. So why, in the two thousand and thirteenth year of our lord are we still letting a single aspect of appearance determine so much of our world.
And why aren't people saying anything? Great, African Americans and Latinos stood up for themselves. But where the fuck were the white people? Where the fuck were they? Just because something isn't directly about you doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. Just because you're not the target doesn't mean you don't get schrapnel. And when we refuse to acknowledge what is right, and when we refuse to stand up for it, that's when we abandon democracy and liberalism.
So my call to action is to stand up for you believe in. Whether that's the ability to wear white after labor day or the need for change in the way we conceptualize race lines in this country, figure it out and make your voice heard. Maybe if we act quickly we can be remembered as a generation that gave more than two shits about anything besides apple.
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