The protest last week has sparked a remarkable amount of controversy and discussion on campus, a good deal of which I have had the opportunity to hear. As an attendee at the protest, my feelings about the event have evolved and are still evolving, as are my ideas about racism on campus.
I want to thank Lin Wang and Samaria Johnson for sharing their perspectives with the campus body on the pages of The Crimson White last week. I was absolutely one of the individuals congratulating myself and my campus for our activism, and your words challenged me and pushed me to think critically about my motives, my assumptions and the impact that my actions were really having on campus.
I know that your opinions have been met with a lot of defensiveness and in some cases outright hostility, and this fact makes me recognize that we have a long way to go and that perhaps we are going in the wrong direction.
When allies become leaders in a movement that is inherently not about them, the movement itself becomes a platform for the privileged to declare themselves as good instead of an opportunity for marginalized people to speak and be heard. As an ally, I’ve always seen my role as being about empowering people, listening and using what privilege I do have to accomplish something meaningful and productive.
However, one of the most important roles that I have to play is responding to criticism thoughtfully and gracefully, and accepting responsibility when I am called out for being insensitive, for being counterproductive and for failing to check my assumptions. I have done all of these things, and when a friend called me out, it wasn’t because they wanted to embarrass me, and it wasn’t because they wanted me out of the movement. It was because they respected me enough to assume I could take the criticism and do something useful with it, and that in and of itself is a gift.
When allies of any community fail to take criticism from the community seriously, this gives cause for serious pause. Ask yourself why it is so difficult to listen to the community you claim to support. Do you not respect the community enough to listen to their words and open yourself to the possibility of being changed by what you hear?
There are many people of color who want to integrate the white greek system, and there are many others who could not care less. Both of these perspectives must be heard, and more importantly if we hope to mobilize people for a movement that will address racism, we cannot have people who have never experienced racism in the driver’s seat.
We must stop having conversations about racism in rooms full of white people. We must stop assuming that because we oppose racism, our actions have the implicit support of all people of color. We must stop speaking for marginalized communities. We must scrutinize ourselves. And most of all, we must constantly, vigilantly recognize that criticism is a gift, and that for all its challenges it is nowhere near as difficult or as taxing as discrimination.
