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by Jennifer MacKenzie |
"History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing... but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries." Boris PasternakI wrote this to try to figure out why, as plans were laid for the march on the 24th, my primary feeling was unease verging on dread. Any why, after a large student turnout, I still felt that in some essential part, the demonstration had been a failure.
I would like to emphasize as much as possible that the number of march participants and their preparedness was certainly not due to me or others who, like me, dropped out of the organizing process because they felt uncomfortable with or disheartened by it. I am fully aware that my criticizing an end result without having done everything in my power to change it makes me a hypocrite. But I've also had enough conversations with students and residents of Middletown to know that my own inability to connect fully to the current mode of activism is shared by others. I admire the commitment of those core individuals who stuck with it the whole way, who spent hours making signs and video cameras and statements. Coordinating technical details and logistics demands an immense amount of time and energy; and it is on the basis of these mundane, practical considerations that an event often flies or falls.
However, it is precisely the need for a legalistic mentality, so necessary on one level, that can lead to both a blind scrabbling at semantic detail, and a cynical overattention to empty formalism. I see two flaws in the anatomy of recent student protests; these flaws surface as obvious contradictions in statements. For example, panicking about walking on the grass, being hesitant to use the words "racist" or "brutality" because they sound "too antagonistic", while at the same time demanding "a revamping of the entire police department" which "the community" will hold "accountable for its actions and beliefs", "to work on eliminating biases inherent in the department." Not to get bogged down in twisting quotes around, but the spirit of these words serves to indicate the two planes of perspective I'm talking about. And between them, were the substantive pillars of humane knowledge and feeling ought to join them, is...not much. Or not much audible, in the way of personal, practical understanding.
Whether or not Officer Clayton broke the law, whether or not Officer Goodwin won some arbitration, police brutality is obviously, statistically, a national as well as a very local problem, and a chronic one. And no one who has been at Wesleyan very long should be surprised by that. While I have no doubt there are many, many decent individual police officers whose lives may justify the pillar the fraternal order of police tries to place all cops up on, I am equally certain that the nature of law enforcement agencies guarantees the abuse of their power. When a person's legal fees, weaponry and morality are all sponsored carte blanche by the state, when they are accountable to virtually no one, this power is liable to corrupt them: just as the nature of our current political system inextricably weds politicians to big money interests, just as when you build more prisons you will suddenly find yourself with more prisoners, just as when you sell military strongmen your surplus arms and train their goons through your instructors you will discover them installing themselves as dictators, and then (conveniently) making friendly deals with your international corporations, etc.
We at Wesleyan sit for the most part on the very tip of an iceberg of unequal power relations; that is to say, of systematic coercion. Officer Clayton's comments wet perhaps just the tips of our toes. The louder we cry out in surprise, the more naive we show ourselves to be. Of course an armed branch of the government was antagonized when a large group of students publicized its own dirty dealings and bullying; Mumia Abu Jamal expected to be framed. Institutionalized authority never welcomes questioning. So why bother tossing it the apologetic bone of, "We are not a group of uneducated lovers of cop-killers"?
Maybe you take a more moderate stance. Listening to people voice their opinions, an underlying, unexamined difference of vision regarding the police became apparent. Are the cops our friends? Why yes, assuredly, as long as we identify ourselves only with a privileged elite. But start talking about death row prisoners, immigrant labor, teenagers, especially of color, the homeless: then our freedom of expression becomes offensive to many in positions of power. Yet not much was said in the Traverse Square parking lot about anyone other than students, despite the obvious connection to Mumia's case - because that might be 'too inflammatory". So instead of using this "Clayton Incident" to educate "the community" - however it chooses to define itself - about continuing local violence, national hot-spots of brutality, Jamal's case, or the conservative prejudices activists have and will always encounter, what was demonstrated was that this campus likes to talk mostly about itself. I know that many marchers believe in more than was vocalized then. But this is the impression many residents were left with. Pleased with my iceberg analogy, I shared it with a couple of Traverse Square residents I was talking to. "Yeah," he told me, "now you go back to your lunch and your classes, you've never missed a meal in your life. And I'm sitting here drowning."
I don't understand how change is effected on a grass-roots level any more clearly than anyone else. But I am growing more and more uncertain of the value of marches, press conferences, and speak-outs. Listening to my friends, I can easily hear when they stop speaking their own words and begin to graft on jargon. I use we-speak too, and chalk "Equal enforcement of justice" without really knowing what that means, or how anyone could go about getting it done.
As activism leans more and more heavily on the media for support, concrete, "practical" actions give way to abstract, symbolic gestures. These can be valuable in developing broader networks of support, but without inner sincerity they become mere posturing. There is something glamorous about acting the part of an activist, as immortalized in documentaries about the sixties: it is a role highly validated by liberal youth culture. In a meeting prior to the march, a few people expressed that they wouldn't mind being arrested if trouble came up: "That's what we're here for, isn't it?" I have to disagree: I don't think that's necessarily what we were there for, unless that really would have helped to oppose police harassment.
Maybe listening to a discussion of whether "we" want to use a giant eyeball, video camera or coffin to embody our discontent has simply made me cynical, not to mention how to please the press with maximum efficiency - the press, which originally tried to bully speakers on Saturday by threatening to leave. But maybe the forms of protest that were established by previous movements have rotted from the inside: maybe the formal ritual of a march has grown hollow, turned into an empty reflex reaction.
Vaclav Haavel wrote, "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out a certain way. Hope is the conviction that something makes sense, no matter what the outcome." This process of making sense, for me, has always meant the inward balancing of doubt and trust. I wrote this essay partly to exorcize that darker voice which can persuade anyone into apathetic paralysis. But it is a voice that can also lay a foundation for truly constructive revision of a movement or a belief. As one party to last Friday's conversation pointed out, we should not look at anything that reveals a greater body of truth on which to act as a setback. I don't understand how change is effected by individuals; that's part of what I'm here to find out. But I hope that in the process of defining the problem, or crisis, that I sense, that I have at least besieged it.