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FOCUS: A Day When Journalism Died |
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Sunday, 13 December 2015 11:36 |
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Parry writes: "Looking back over my four decades in the national news media, it's hard to identify one moment when American journalism died. The process was a slow and ugly one, with incremental acts of cowardice accumulating until mainstream reporters were clearly part of the problem, not anything to do with a solution. But the date Dec. 9 has a special place in that sad progression."
Investigative reporter Gary Webb in 1997. (photo: Randy Pench/The Sacramento Bee)
A Day When Journalism Died
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
13 December 15
Dec. 9 has a grim meaning for the Republic, the date in 2004 when investigative reporter Gary Webb, driven to ruin by vindictive press colleagues for reviving the Contra-cocaine scandal, took his own life, a demarcation as the U.S. press went from protecting the people to shielding the corrupt, writes Robert Parry.
 ooking back over my four decades in the national news media, it’s hard to identify one moment when American journalism died. The process was a slow and ugly one, with incremental acts of cowardice accumulating until mainstream reporters were clearly part of the problem, not anything to do with a solution. But the date Dec. 9 has a special place in that sad progression.
It was on Dec. 9, 2004, when the mean-spirited mainstream media’s treatment of investigative journalist Gary Webb led him – his career devastated, his family broken, his money gone and his life seemingly hopeless – to commit suicide. It was a moment that should have shamed all the big-shot journalists who had a hand in Webb’s destruction, but it mostly didn’t.
Webb’s offense was to have revived the shocking story of the Reagan administration’s tolerance of cocaine smuggling by the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the 1980s. Though the scandal was real – and had been partly exposed in real time – the major newspapers had locked arms in defense of President Ronald Reagan and the CIA. The sordid scandal apparently was deemed “not good for the country,” so it was buried.
My Associated Press colleague, Brian Barger, and I had written the first story exposing the Contras’ involvement in cocaine smuggling in 1985, but our story was attacked by Reagan’s skillful propaganda team, which got The New York Times and other major news outlets to buy into the denials.
Later that decade, a gutsy investigation by then-Sen. John Kerry filled in some of the gaps showing how the Reagan administration’s collaboration with drug-tainted airlines and other parts of the Contras’ cocaine smuggling apparatus had functioned. But Kerry’s probe was also mocked by the major media. Sniffing out that conventional wisdom, Newsweek deemed Kerry “a randy conspiracy buff.”
Kerry’s brush with this near-political-death-experience over the Contra-cocaine scandal taught him some hard lessons about survival in Washington, which help explain why he was such a disappointing candidate during Election 2004 and why he has shown such timidity in challenging Official Washington’s “group thinks” as Secretary of State.
For both U.S. journalists and politicians, there was no upside to doing the hard work of exposing this kind of crime of state. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What’s the Matter with John Kerry.”]
Same Stonewall
In 1996, Gary Webb encountered the same stonewall when he stumbled onto evidence showing that some of the Contra cocaine, after being smuggled into the United States, had flowed into the production of “crack” cocaine in Los Angeles and contributed to the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s.
When he published his findings in a series for the San Jose Mercury News, the major newspapers had a choice: either admit that they had slinked away from one of the biggest scandals of the 1980s or redouble their efforts to discredit the story and to destroy anyone who dared touch it. They went with option two.
In a tag-team pummeling of Gary Webb, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times all denounced Webb and decried his reporting. Soon, Webb’s editors at the Mercury News were feeling the heat and rather than back their reporter, they sought to salvage their own careers. They sold Webb out – and he was soon out of a job and unemployable in the mainstream media.
The bitter irony was that Webb’s reporting finally forced a relatively thorough and honest investigation by the CIA’s Inspector General Frederick Hitz, who concluded in 1998 that not only were the Contras involved in the drug trade from their start in 1980 and through the entire decade but that CIA officers were aware of the problem and helped cover it up, putting the goal of ousting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government ahead of blowing the whistle on these corrupt CIA clients.
Yet, even the CIA’s confession wasn’t enough to shame the major newspapers into admitting the truth and acknowledging their own culpability in the long-running cover-up. It remained easier to continue the demonization of Gary Webb.
At Consortiumnews, we were one of the few news outlets that examined the extraordinary admissions contained in the CIA’s two-volume report and in a corresponding Justice Department Inspector General’s report, which added more details about how criminal investigations of the Contras were thwarted. But, sadly, we lacked the reach and the clout of the major newspapers.
As the controversy bubbled in 1996, I also had joined with Webb in several speaking engagements on the West Coast. Though we sometimes spoke to large and enthusiastic crowds, the power of the Big Media overwhelmed everything, especially the truth. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.”]
Webb’s Demise
In the years after the Contra-cocaine story was buried once again, I lost touch with Webb who had landed a job with a California state legislative committee. So, I didn’t realize that after that job ended, Webb’s life was spiraling downward. Even modest-sized newspapers refused to consider hiring the “disgraced” reporter.
Webb’s marriage fell apart; he struggled to pay child-support and other bills; he was faced with a forced move out of a house near Sacramento, California, and in with his mother. Deeply depressed, according to his family members, Webb chose to end his life.
On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers — who were coming the next morning — to instead call 911.
Webb then took out his father’s pistol and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more. (Yes, I know that conspiracy theorists have seized on the two shots to insist that Webb was murdered by the CIA, but there is no proof of that and by pushing that baseless account, people simply let the real culprits – the big newspapers – off the hook.)
After Webb’s body was found, I received a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who knew that I was one of Webb’s few journalistic colleagues who had defended him and his work. I told the reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the Los Angeles Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had essentially ignored Hitz’s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb.
To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The Los Angeles Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb, nor the CIA’s admissions in 1998. The obituary was republished in other newspapers, including The Washington Post.
Even though Webb’s reputation posthumously received some rehabilitation with a sympathetic portrayal of his ordeal in Jeremy Renner’s 2014 movie, “Kill the Messenger,” some news executives who aided the Contra-cocaine cover-up in the 1980s and abetted the destruction of Webb in the 1990s still won’t admit their complicity in suppressing one of the most important stories of that era, people such as The Washington Post’s Jeff Leen and Leonard Downie. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “WPost’s Slimy Attack on Gary Webb and “How the Washington Press Turned Bad.”]
A few journalists have continued to find nuggets of the Contra-cocaine scandal, including from accounts by former CIA contract pilot Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, who supplied details about his work ferrying guns and drugs for Reagan’s Contras, as reported by John McPhaul of The Tico Times, based in San Jose, Costa Rica. Even Fox News poked into the Contra-cocaine connection in an article about alleged CIA complicity in the 1985 torture-murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
But the resistance from the major U.S. news media and the ferocity from Reagan’s acolytes whenever their hero’s legacy is challenged have left this very real scandal in the netherworld of doubt and uncertainty, a key chapter of America’s Lost History in which Dec. 9, 2004, conveys a baleful message.
[As part of our end-of-year fund drive, Consortiumnews is offering a DVD of “Kill the Messenger” and a CD of Webb and Parry speaking about the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996. For details on this special offer, click here.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
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Threats and Violent Attacks Against Muslims in the US, Just From This Week |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 December 2015 09:14 |
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Greenwald writes: "Three weeks ago, CAIR revealed that it 'has received more reports about acts of Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats, and violence targeting American Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslim) and Islamic institutions in the past week-and-a-half than during any other limited period of time since the 9/11 terror attacks.'"
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Occupy.com)
Threats and Violent Attacks Against Muslims in the US, Just From This Week
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
13 December 15
 his is just from the last week: it does not include the spate of similar and even worse attacks on Muslims and mosques in the U.S. prior to December 8, such the multiple gunshots fired at a Connecticut mosque in the wake of the November Paris attack, or the bullet-ridden Quran left outside an Islamic store in Anaheim in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings. Nor does it include the large number of similar incidents outside the U.S. but in the west, such as the attack on a 22-year-old Muslim woman riding on a bus last week in Birmingham, England, or the vandalization of a mosque in Townsville, Australia yesterday, or the removal of Muslims from public transportation both in the U.S. and UK. Nor does it include cases where the cause is not yet known, such as the death last week of a 16-year-old Seattle Muslim student who either fell or was thrown from a roof.
Three weeks ago, CAIR revealed that it “has received more reports about acts of Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats, and violence targeting American Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslim) and Islamic institutions in the past week-and-a-half than during any other limited period of time since the 9/11 terror attacks.” As CNN’s Ben Brumfield reported earlier this week, “xenophobic bile has poured out against peaceful, law-abiding Americans who practice Islam.” CNN’s religion reporter Daniel Burke yesterday wrote that 2015 “has been one of the most intensely anti-Muslim periods in American history.”
There are numerous causes, most of them obvious: 14 years of non-stop war waged by the U.S. and its allies in predominantly western countries; the U.S. media’s mainstreaming of anti-Muslim polemicists; the bile unleashed and legitimized by the Trump campaign; the vile and deeply irresponsible rhetoric coming from U.S. politicians such as Democratic Rep. (and Senate candidate) Loretta Sanchez of California; the attempts to exploit attacks in Paris and San Bernardino for long-standing agendas designed to demonize Muslims and Islam. But whatever the causes, just imagine what it’s like to be an American Muslim living under these threats and attacks.
These sentiments are by no means universal and there are some positive stories of Americans pushing back. Some anonymous non-Muslims are leaving notes of support at their local mosques and Islamic community centers. The conservative GOP Mormon Senator from Arizona Jeff Flake attended a prayer service last night at a Scottsdale mosque and vehemently condemned anti-Muslim rhetoric. Some conservative figures are eloquently denouncing the emerging anti-Muslim bile.
But all of that is being drowned by these growing and deeply menacing trends aimed at American Muslims. The events speak for themselves. There is, it turns out, a serious problem of domestic terrorism in the U.S., but it’s not the kind that typically receives attention or concern.
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The Climate Crisis Is a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Make Our World More Equitable |
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Sunday, 13 December 2015 09:13 |
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Klein writes: "The deal that will be unveiled in less than a week - likely to much fanfare and self-congratulation from politicians and an overly deferential press - will not be enough to keep us safe. In fact, it will be extraordinarily dangerous."
Naomi Klein. (photo: Kourosh Keshiri/Grist)
The Climate Crisis Is a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Make Our World More Equitable
By Naomi Klein, Reader Supported News
13 December 15
These remarks are adapted from a speech by Naomi Klein on Monday at "Now is Not the Time For Small Steps: Solutions to the Climate Crisis and the Role of Trade Unions" at Salle Olympe de Gouges.
 ere is what we know about what to expect from the official climate negotiations.
The deal that will be unveiled in less than a week -- likely to much fanfare and self-congratulation from politicians and an overly deferential press -- will not be enough to keep us safe. In fact, it will be extraordinarily dangerous.
The targets that the major economies brought to Paris lead us to a future of 3-4 degrees warming -- those are the Tyndall Centre's numbers -- not 2 degrees, as was pledged in Copenhagen. Two degrees is how our governments defined "dangerous warming" in the Copenhagen Accord.
And we also know from leading climate scientists like James Hansen that 2 degrees is too high. Indeed we know from lived experience that the amount we've already warmed the globe is too much. We are already living the era of dangerous warming. It is already costing many thousands of lives and livelihoods -- from the Philippines to Bangladesh to Nigeria to New Orleans to the Marshall Islands.
Speaking about climate change as if "dangerous" is a place far off in the distance is nothing less than, as my friend Kumi Naidoo put it yesterday, "subliminal racism." And it's getting less and less subliminal every day.
So we know already that the deal will steamroll over scientific red lines. We also know, from the paltry levels of financing wealthy countries have put on the table, that it is going to steamroll over equity red lines. That wealthy countries will continue to fail to do our fair share of emission reductions, or to pay our fair share for the impacts of that failure. And we must pay -- pay so that poorer countries that did little to create this crisis are compensated for loss and damage and so that they can leap frog over fossil fuels and go directly to a clean energy economy.
Which is why, on Dec. 12 at 12 o'clock -- that's 12, 12, 12 -- many activists will be in the streets of Paris, peacefully demonstrating against the violation of these red lines. We will also be mourning the lives already lost to climate disruption, in solidarity with the lives lost to the tragic attacks here in Paris, and enlarging that circle of mourning.
By taking to the streets, we will be clearly and unequivocally rejecting the Hollande government's draconian and opportunistic bans on marches, protests and demonstrations, the shameful pre-emptive arrests of climate activists and the unprecedented restrictions on the freedom of speech of civil society within the summit.
Liberté is not just a word and it does not just apply to Christmas markets and football matches. Indeed it means nothing if it does not apply to political dissent and the defense of life on earth.
This disobedience does not make us insensitive. It does not make us hooligans. It is our sacred duty -- to those suffering in the present day and to those who stand to lose so much more if we lose this race against time for climate justice. And yet as we join together to reject the dangerous world offering by the governments inside Le Bourget, as well as by the corporations who finance them, we must also do more than say "no."
We must also say "yes" -- yes to the world we want. We need to paint a picture of what life could be like inside those scientific red lines, life within the limits imposed on us by nature. And that life needs to be not just better than a future of climate catastrophe. It needs to be better than the present -- a present of catastrophic levels of austerity, deepening inequality and rising racism.
That is our task. Jeremy Corbyn rightly describes the challenge we face as a crisis of imagination. We must imagine a world that is both radically different and radically better than the one we have right now.
So I want to spend some time sharing an experience we had in my home country, Canada, where a group of us -- 60 organizers, leaders and theorists from movements representing labor, climate, migrant rights, anti-poverty, food justice, housing rights, women's rights -- came together to do something we do very rarely.
And that is to dream together. To sketch out a future that would respect both natural limits and human rights and human needs. We came up with a document called The Leap manifesto that has now been signed by over 100 Canadian organizations, including many trade unions, and tens of thousands of Canadians, including Leonard Cohen and Ellen Page. It has inspired similar manifestos to be written from Nunuvut to Australia.
At its heart is the argument that if we take the imperative to rapidly build a post-carbon economy seriously, we have a once-in-a-century chance to transform our economy to make it far more equitable, so that it works for many more people. This would be a clean economy with many more good unionized jobs that pay a living wage. With better public services that are more equitably distributed.
But before I get into that optimistic stuff, I want to confess that I didn't come to climate change by seeing the sunny side of disaster. Quite the opposite: I come to it by looking at the worst that humans are capable of in times of crisis -- what I call "disaster capitalism."
My climate change "wake up" came almost exactly 10 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina was devastating New Orleans. That experience showed me that there is this irreconcilable conflict between the reality of climate change and the so-called free market ideology that has ruled our world for four decades.
Because we must always remember that what happened in New Orleans was not just about the weather. It was the collision of heavy weather and the legacy of four decades of systematic dismantling of the public sphere, and layered on top of all of it was the reality of systemic racism at every level.
Once Katrina hit, residents confronted what Paul Krugman calls the "Can't do state." FEMA seemingly couldn't find New Orleans for five days. People -- overwhelmingly African American -- were just abandoned, left on their own.
And then, after the shock... came "The Shock Doctrine." For right-wing ideologues, the post-Katrina plan was simple: use the crisis to do away with the public sphere all together. Public housing. Public school. Public hospitals. The other thing that Republicans pushed for immediately after Katrina was to suspend labor standards in the area.
So the reconstruction of New Orleans became a hotbed of labor abuses, particularly for migrant workers. This is why the fights for labor rights and the fight against austerity cannot be separated from the fight for climate action. The public sphere that the international labor movement is working so hard to defend is our only defense against the storms, the floods, the health emergencies.
And as we have just been reminded: Europe is not immune. The UK is not immune. In "This Changes Everything," I have a passage on how the 2013 British floods revealed the incompatibility of austerity and climate crisis.
In 2012, The Guardian revealed that "nearly 300 flood defense schemes across England [had] been left un-built due to government budget cuts." David Cameron had gutted the Environment Agency (EA), which is responsible for dealing with flooding. Since 2009, at least 1,150 jobs had been lost at the agency, with as many as 1,700 more on the chopping block, adding up to approximately a quarter of its total workforce. And Cameron knew he had been caught out. "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent."
The problem with austerity is not just that it interferes with our ability to defend ourselves from the heavy weather we have already locked in. It's also that public investments -- in green energy, public transit and clean rail -- are the only thing that will lower our emissions quickly enough to prevent catastrophic warming.
That's why in The Leap manifesto we have these key demands: "We need to invest in our decaying public infrastructure so that it can withstand increasingly frequent extreme weather events."
But we wanted to do more than call for "green jobs" in disaster response and putting up solar panels. We are also calling for a wave of new investment in the low-carbon workforce that is already out there. So another of our demands is this: "We must expand those sectors that are already low-carbon: caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media."
Environmentalists don't usually mention it but teaching and caring for kids doesn't burn much carbon. Nor does caring for the sick. When we care for each other, we care for the planet. So it makes no sense that these are the very sectors under relentless attack by cost-cutting politicians.
Which is why we felt that it was absolutely crucial to say something else in the Leap: That austerity is a manufactured crisis. That the money we need is out there -- we just have to get at it. And we know exactly how to do it: An end to fossil fuel subsidies.
Financial transaction taxes. Increased royalties on fossil fuel extraction. Higher income taxes on corporations and wealthy people. A progressive carbon tax. Cuts to military spending.
This process is partly inspired by a terrific Climate Justice group in the Bay Area called Movement Generation. At an event we did together, one of their organizers, Quinton Sankofa, said something that should guide us: "Transition is inevitable. Justice is not."
What that means is that if we want the response to climate change to be fair and equitable, then we are going to need to fight to make sure that it is. If we want climate jobs to be safe, unionized jobs that pay living wage, then we need to fight to make that happen.
And we know climate change is not the only crisis we face. We also face a crisis of joblessness. Of inequality. Of racial and gender injustice. Of social exclusion. We face a crisis in the abuse and mistreatment of workers, especially immigrant workers and workers of color, women most of all.
So when we talk about climate solutions in this context, it cannot just be about emission reduction targets. Neither can it be about saying: "Climate change is so big, and so urgent, and time is so short, that it should trump everything else."
It has to be about designing and then fighting for integrated solutions, ones that radically bring down emissions, while simultaneously building more just economies and democracies based on true equality.
Take Germany. Germany's energy transition has created 400,000 jobs in a decade and not just cleaned up energy but made it fairer -- so that energy systems are owned and controlled by hundreds and hundreds of municipalities and energy co-operatives.
Little known fact: one of the things that allowed this to happen is that Germans have reversed energy privatizations in hundreds of cities and towns. That's why one of the key demands of The Leap manifesto is for Energy Democracy -- that communities should own and control their own renewable energy projects.
But we have to go further than Energy Democracy. We need Energy Justice. Energy Reparations. Which is why The Leap states that: "Indigenous peoples and others on the frontlines of industrial activity should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects."
As you can see, climate change offers a powerful argument against privatizations, against austerity -- and the same goes for corporate trade deals. Germany has been challenged for its visionary energy transition under an investor-state clause. It is being sued for 4.7 billion euros by the Swedish energy giant Vantenfall. This is scandalous, and there are many trade challenges like it.
Which is why this is another one of The Leap's key demands: "We call for an end to all trade deals that interfere with our attempts to rebuild local economies, regulate corporations and stop damaging extractive projects." We certainly shouldn't be signing new ones like the TTIP and the TPP.
Another piece of common ground we found had to do with the rights of migrants and refugees. We know that climate change is a driver of conflict and migration already and that this is only going to get more severe.
So the manifesto calls for full rights for all workers, regardless of status, as well as to an opening of borders to many more migrants and refugees, acknowledging our role in the wars, trade deals and climate disasters that are collectively driving so many people from their lands.
Now I realize all this sounds like a lot to take on -- but that is the whole point of the Leap project. It's premised on the fact that we have gone so far off course, and time is so short, that we aren't going to get to where we need to go with baby steps.
We have to go for it, on all fronts, and tell a coherent story about how all of our issues are connected by a different set of values about how we should treat one another and the natural world that is the source of all life.
Friends, time is not just short. We have run out of time. This is our historical moment.
Let us not disappoint. The stakes are simply too high.
Now is not the time for small steps.
Now is the time for boldness.
Now is the time to leap.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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The Necessary Recklessness of Campus Protests |
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Sunday, 13 December 2015 09:08 |
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Turkson writes: "The critics claim that students' demands are unnecessary, and the nature of their demanding unwarranted. So, logically, the protests themselves are reckless. They become the reckless expressions of over-emotional, over-reactive kids, bloated on political correctness, with a poor grasp of the First Amendment. The collective impact of this type of critical response is rarely discourse, it's dismissal."
University of Massachusetts Amherst student Evandro Tavares speaks to students gathered to highlight issues from racial inclusion to student debt, during a march at the Student Union on the UMass campus in Amherst, Mass. (photo: Carol Lollis/Daily Hampshire Gazette/AP)
The Necessary Recklessness of Campus Protests
By Nshira Turkson, The Atlantic
13 December 15
Progress against racial injustice is stagnant, yet the demands of student activists are still widely dismissed.
 remember wanting to leave. One of us wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania; another friend talked about going to school in Maryland. My friend and I would be at Duke by spring semester. I told a senior about our collective plans to transfer out of Princeton and he said: “Everyone says that freshman year; no one actually leaves.”
We weren’t special. We were only the latest in a lineage that felt some kind of discomfort and sought escape. The senior had thought the same thing his first semester. He tried to identify it like we did. We tried to root what we felt in parties that didn’t play music we liked, in very strange and palpably elitist traditions, in buildings with names of men who did not want us there. I had a transfer application open on my computer because I wanted one of my friends to see it and laugh. We knew we weren’t going anywhere, that we were lucky to be there; so we had been told. I remember telling it to myself. Sometimes I still do. And when later, we heard the same complaints, the same desires from other black underclassmen, I remembered what we were told our first year. That senior was right. None of us left.
Over the past few weeks, college students in the U.S. and abroad have turned into activists, demonstrating against racial injustice on their campuses. Critiques, of course, pursue these protests. A large portion focus on behaviors they term reckless. They single out Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike at the University of Missouri, a $1 million refusal by Mizzou’s football team, students at Princeton calling for the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from campus buildings, the demand for safe spaces on campus, or the demand for media-free safe spaces in public areas. The word used, though, is rarely “reckless.” It is “coddled,” “sensitive,” or plainly, “enough.”
The critics claim that students’ demands are unnecessary, and the nature of their demanding unwarranted. So, logically, the protests themselves are reckless. They become the reckless expressions of over-emotional, over-reactive kids, bloated on political correctness, with a poor grasp of the First Amendment. The collective impact of this type of critical response is rarely discourse, it’s dismissal.
The poet Claudia Rankine, in her essay describing the “condition of black life [as] one of mourning,” wrote: “When blacks become overwhelmed by our culture’s disorder and protest (ultimately to our own detriment, because protest gives the police justification to militarize, as they did in Ferguson), the wrongheaded question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we? Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?”
The night Darren Wilson was not indicted for the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, about 300 students marched around Princeton’s campus, chanting for justice and peace. I remember a white student blowing cigarette smoke in the faces of marchers who passed close to him. I remember that my friend and I were shocked as we passed him. A few days later, I remembered a black-and-white picture I’d seen growing up in high school textbooks, in documentaries on the civil-rights movement. It’s of a young black man blowing smoke in a black girl’s face, to prepare her for what she would likely face at a sit-in. It’s from 1960.
The reckless demands made by the student protesters to their universities constitute recognition of what progress actually isn’t.
The students are demanding them to imagine: What is it like to enter a building or look at a mural of someone who did not think you good or human enough to be in that building, to be looking at that mural? I did this for my last two years at Princeton, as a major in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. My friends and I made jokes about reparations when we turned in our theses to the Wilson School. We had been reminded by the name for two years, and by the school for four, that we were there, but Princeton was not ours. We carved out our spaces and moved through, ending up with T-shirts that said Woodrow Wilson in cursive scribble across the front, us wondering if this was winning. I wondered why we had to be at war at all.
The protesters’ demand isn’t to excise the pain endemic to being in a space where they were once not allowed. That’s impossible; it is history. It’s that university administrations work to understand inclusion as a step. Left alone, as it has been, it’s merely palliative. Access can’t temper exclusion if its legacy is not addressed. These students are demanding it be addressed. Their protests are the natural result of bearing such a legacy’s hostilities.
Hostilities like a noose hung on campus at Duke, and then the university administration denying it was a hate crime. A frat denying female students of color entry into a party. My last year at Princeton, at a panel on socioeconomic diversity on campus, a lecturer implied that black and Latino students, and student athletes were less intelligent, citing meritocratic admissions at other schools, where student populations are overwhelmingly white and Asian. My friend, a black kid, had him, a man who said the racial diversity “we have in this country” is “bad diversity”, as a precept instructor the previous semester.
A day after Jonathan Butler ended his hunger strike and Mizzou President Tim Wolfe resigned, Butler spoke to a crowd with protest group #ConcernedStudent1950 behind him: “Please stop focusing on the fact of the Mizzou hunger strike itself, look at why did we have to get here in the first place, why the struggle, and why we had to fight the way that we did.” He presented his hunger strike not as the reckless act of a lone individual, but rather, as the culmination of the efforts of a broader movement. “After all the letters we’ve sent, all the in-person interactions. After all the forums we’ve attended. After all the tweets and DMs that we’ve sent telling the administration about our pain, it should not have taken this much.” He presented the history of denials.
This history is paralleled at Yale, where student protesters said in their demands: “Over the past week, people of color, especially women, outpoured painful experiences of blatant racism at Yale and organized their peers to demonstrate solidarity and resilience. They spent hours meeting with President Salovey and Dean Holloway—as well as other administrators, faculty, and fellow students—in an attempt to ask for help in ensuring their safety and well-being on campus. President Salovey’s first response was to announce that Yale is now a tobacco-free campus.”
The absurdity lies in the contrast: The students’ confession of pain yielded a smoking ban. The students invested emotional labor, and a tremendous amount of time—these are still students, whose job it is to graduate—in an attempt at progress, only to be met with a non sequitur. They received no recognition of the emotional intensity of asking for more, through the quiet institutional path, and being denied.
After Darren Wilson was not indicted, some of my friends and I formed the Black Justice League, a group against campus racism, out of mourning, and out of a need for the mourning to end. One of our friends was researching the history of black-student protests for his thesis. He warned the group that the university would use bureaucracy to try dampen our protests. He warned us that committees and task forces would be formed. Meetings would be scheduled before breaks or early in the morning. They would wait for the seniors to graduate and pray that the summer would calm the rest down.
Most of his predictions proved prophetic. Princeton’s president Eisgruber himself seemed to confirm these warnings in an email sent out following the 32-hour sit-in at his office: “In December of last year, I charged a Special Task Force on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to develop recommendations that would enable our University to provide a more welcoming environment for students of all backgrounds.” And still, a year later, on a November night, students were asleep on stones and grass and in tents, blankets, and sleeping bags, outside of the oldest building on campus.
Operating through the institutions, through forums and task forces, has not been enough. Historically, institutions operate slowly, but also historically, these institutions were created by excluding certain population groups. How much is possible without recognition of past injustice?
What persists is implicit in #ConcernedStudent1950’s name. It was the year black students were admitted into Mizzou. But focusing on such milestones only reinforces the narrow, limiting notion of continual progress. Slavery ended in 1865. Yale produced a black graduate in 1874, and black students arrived at Mizzou in 1950. The black student protests took place in the 1960s. All these things that are named progress, with beginnings and their celebrated ends.
The third demand on the #ConcernedStudent1950 group’s list is: “We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in the 1969 for the betterment of the black community.” June Beshea, the president of the Real Silent Sam Coalition, a black activist group at the University of North Carolina, read out demands from 1968 at a recent demonstration. The demands render this connection explicit: “In 1968 the Black Student Movement issued 23 demands to the University. Almost 50 years have passed, but if you look at the demands you realize we are still dealing with exactly the same issues: little has changed.”
This terrifying dissonance between progress and what still exists is not unique to the campuses, it’s part of the American bloodline. It is a sentiment that stretches from slavery to mass incarceration, Black Lives Matter, and these campus protests. Imagine them on a string, all these manifestations with beginnings and ends; history and progress. The demand is for the recognition of the string itself. It’s an interrogation that perhaps only seems to benefit those demanding for it, perhaps that is why it remains undone. Why can the integration of black students be called progress, while today’s protests are called reckless? The demand for this recognition goes against the very pervasive sentiment it wants recognized.
Parul Sehgal highlighted this dissonance in her defense of the student protesters’ resilience, by quoting James Meredith, the first black student enrolled at the University of Mississippi: ‘‘Ole Miss kicked my butt, and they’re still celebrating,’’ he said in an interview with Esquire in 2012. ‘‘Because every black that’s gone there since me has been insulted, humiliated, and they can’t even tell their story. Everybody has to tell James Meredith’s story—which is a lie. The powers that be in Mississippi understand this very clearly.’’ He continued, ‘‘They’re gonna keep on doin’ it because it makes it impossible for the blacks there now to say anything about what’s happened to them.’’
And if it is this impossible, I am not sure what is left but recklessness. Who demands their body back quietly?
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