Where you at Columbia students??
NYTimes reports a "hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teachers College" this past Tuesday. I'll spare Pepper et al the TU for not already throwin' this TU, but come on, asshole Columbia students! Y'all need to tighten that shit up now! I'll say it once and I'll say it a billion more times: there is no room for hate-crimes in 2007. Especially after you guys held one of the tightest displays of free speech in the past decade! (Sorry, Becca; I actually thought it pretty tight. Not the invite for Ahmadinejad to come speak so much as the kind of discouse it encourages and the accountability it requires, or at least tries to require, of everyone involved.) Anyway, I'm tired of this crap! Stop the hate, haters.
::gets off soapbox::
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5 comments:
Mandy, you are absolutely right. I was going to say this earlier, but got caught up in a clusterfuckload amount of work this afternoon.
This is bullshit. This is really just a sad day here. People are genuinely infuriated as they should be. I worked with communities of color for two years of volunteer work, and I have to say racism is sadly alive and well in this country.
This is a display of ignorance, bigotry, and fear of who the professor represents: success and respect for a Black woman. Some people can't face that, even in 2007.
The real hate crime is that one in three black men in this country is currently or has experienced incarceration. We are using the system of prison industrial complex guide an injustice that goes beyond words. We can't keep using prisons as our solution when we haven't had a truth and reconciliation commission in this country, and let a lot of fear and hate out at the people that perpetuated and profited from slavery. We need to talk about education and positivity for young black men in this country, and not throw tests and threats at them. ok, off my soap box.
sad fucking day. i could not fucking imagine getting up in front of a class full of students and explaining this shit to them. like we're the adults and this crap happens in our world.
Indeed: this really burned my biscuits. Teacher's college is around the corner from my apartment, so if I see any shady dudes carry nooses, I will initiate some smack.
Matthew, it's interesting you mention the disproportionate number of black men in incarceration because I'm only just now getting up to speed with the HBO series Oz that had it's run in the late 90s, and that theme is one of the main tenants of the series. It is tackled pretty well, too; thought provoking, if nothing else. Check it out if you haven't already.
Anyway, I'm sure Dr. Constantine will handle this just fine, it's just infuriating she has to handle it at all. At least her work is exactly the kind of stuff that will hopefully encourage the expansion of peoples' attitudes and dispositions towards race relations as opposed to a digression of thought into that of the 1950s.
this same thing happened at the university of maryland about a month or two ago. i'd expect such slackness from the recalcitrant terrapins, but not from you columbiatches. tighten up.
i think any publicity given to this incident is bad publicity; it will only encourage more fucktwits to pull off similar stunts. these people are desperate for attention, so let's not give them any. let the police quietly track them down and put their nuts in a sling (or at least expel them).
i actually think the contrast between the noose and an educated, professional black woman is a heartening sign of how far African Americans (and women) have come since the days when nooses were true symbols of violence and oppression. now i think they're only symbols of ignorance and hate, which, ideally, can be ignored or laughed out the door. (though whether displaying a noose is an assault unto itself is an interesting legal debate i'd like to explore.)
crosby: i hear you about the prison system (though i think a truth and reconciliation commission is a terrible idea). i would add that the so-called war on drugs has been a terrible (and counterproductive) policy that in many ways has been driven by racism (e.g. the immense disparity between punishing people for possessing crack cocaine vs powder cocaine).
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