DartmouthPride.org denounces the hate speech, race
hatred and latent misogyny of certain Dartmouth
#BlackLivesMatter protesters.
We’re disturbed by Vice Provost Ameer’s appeasement of
these practitioners of race-based aggression and hate
speech. There is no excuse for hate. There is no
rationalization for hate.
In a time when people are being gunned down in Paris and in
the US, it’s disgraceful that some of the safest and most
privileged people in the world -- certain Ivy League students --
are endeavoring to hijack the spotlight and turn attention to
what they are falsely alleging is their awful plight.
When we see little tyrannies of bigotry and unfairness, we fight them.
We don’t flinch when it comes to fighting for equality and justice.
Not even in those moments when the tyranny of bias is actually being propagated by folks falsely cloaked in the garb of the righteous and oppressed.
Let’s cut to the chase:
Many of the Dartmouth #BlackLivesMatter protesters in Baker-Berry violated the codes of tolerance.
1. They used offensive hate speech, and that is unacceptable. We, of all people, believe that free speech is sacrosanct. But when we see speech used in a hateful way, we denounce it.
2. They disrespected their fellow students. The students in Baker-Berry who were studying when #BLM protesters stormed in were not slave-owners or oppressors. They were young people reading books. And yet the #BlackLivesMatter marchers disparaged, degraded, and acted belligerently toward them.
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3.The libraries on campus are supposed to be safe places
for women, and yet #BlackLivesMatter violated that campus
safe place and intimidated women based on two criteria: their
skin color and their desire to learn.
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4.It’s shameful to pretend you are oppressed, when you are
in fact privileged. When you do that, you hurt the real
victims. And you weaken the efforts of the more legitimate
activisms.
Dartmouth students -- whether black or white -- are some of the most privileged people on the planet. We’re going to an Ivy League school. And if we’re ethinc, we’re sometimes the beneficiaries of affirmative action, which gives certain races and ethnicities preferential treatment in admisisons and financial aid.
As such, it has become clear that the attempt of the #BlackLivesMatter movement on campus to raise its voice has only resulted in cringes of embarrassment and in self-marginalization. But we believe Dartmouth #BLM members deserve a slightly more robust critique than that: they are elites who are making a mockery out of real suffering, and they are seemingly using the tribulations of others for a) self-aggrandizing reasons and b) in order to secure additional special treatment within their already elite sphere. These students in the many circulating videos from the Baker-Berry event are the country’s elite. And yet they scream as if they were the victims.
So, it is with those people that we want to share some of the rules of the game of real social change, in the hopes that it might help them in the future.
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1.When you fight, you do it with dignity. You march and protest, but you don’t disrespect others if your mission is the acquisition of respect. Barging into Baker-Berry is just an admission that your cause is somewhat limp and you can’t get attention legitimately, that your message is not interesting enough, and without merit. If it had merit, you wouldn’t have to yell at quiet library students. If you can’t get an audience, then you need to re-think what you’re up to.
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2.When you advocate, you speak truth to power. Speaking truth to 19 year-old college students sitting quietly in a library is a cop-out and shows lack of conviction and lack of courage.
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3.A Dartmouth #BlackLivesMatter protestor apparently wrote on their fb page: “We raised hell, we caused discomfort, and we made our voices heard all throughout this campus in the name of standing up for our brothers and sisters across the country who are staring terrorism and assault directly in the face.” Not really. You threw a tantrum in a safe and risk-free environment. No fear of reprisal. No skin in the game. You showed a lack of respect and courage. You betray the tradition of 50‘s sit-ins and wade-ins for racial justice.
When legitimate advocacy groups stage activisms, they do it based on the strength of their premise, not the weakness of it. Legitimate groups argue on the merits of their case. They don’t yell at library students on laptops and then call themselves a success story.
What Dartmouth #BLM has done is damage the cause of
social justice on campus. It has pulled back the veil on
something we’ve noticed more and more evidence of: the
fact that Inclusiveness and Diversity movements are in
some cases harboring hate-mongers -- people who cloak
themselves in words like “Tolerance”, without actually
believeing in it, or living it.
This episode makes us think of those Americans of African
heritage who were unjustly enslaved in the 19th century.
They had dignity. They were the real victims. They are the
real heroes.
And then today there is this new subset of the elite which
seems to manipulate the memory of the wrongfully
enslaved for their own benefit. They don’t act to cherish
the memory of the enslaved; it seems that they act more
to exploit it.
They damage the good people working in the civil rights
space.
We think it’s pretty clear that, if they were alive today,
the dignified and heroic African-Americans who were
enslaved in the 19th century would be deeply saddened by the hate speech of the Dartmouth #BlackLivesMatter movement.
