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Photo: No Hate at 'Gate
"They were born to be slaves and serve White People. Bout time for them to start doing it again."
"No nigger will ever rule the WHITE House".
White-supremacist graffitis were found at Colgate University on the same day the United States elected its first African American president. It's been less than a week, and I am standing in front of an overflowing chapel on this all-American "Hidden Ivy" campus, with over a thousand people who have congregated here to denounce the symbols of a deep, ongoing strand of racism. The midday sun is as dim as the air is crisp, but the chill comes from elsewhere: the bigoted scribbles were part of hundreds of race threats and crimes committed around the same time across the US.
Supremacist incidents such as cross-burnings, assassination betting pools, lynching of black effigies, beatings, spray-painted homes, and Klu Klux Klan outfits have been reported from Maine to Mississipi. In classrooms and school buses from Alaska to deep-blue New York state, students have offered disturbing reports of racist chants and assassination talk. According to Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, "the vitriol is flailing out shotgun-style. They recognize Obama as a tipping point, the perfect storm in the narrative of the hate world – the apocalypse that they've been moaning about has come true."
I was invited to Colgate University by psychology professor Caroline Keating to address her class on "Leadership: How to Change the World". I enjoyed sharing various stories of nonviolent action campaigns, including how the secret draft FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) was forced out in the open, and what the torture-like conditions of solitary confinement were like for me in a neat Ottawa prison.
It was interesting that I should come at such a special moment in the life of the campus, as it confronted its own racism, on the heels of a local string of racial abuse. As I stood on the lawn of Colgate Memorial Chapel and listened to the speeches, I felt a mixture of sadness and joy, pain for the very real insults and threats, and amazement in thinking that 50 or 40 years ago, before the apex of the civil rights movement, such a gathering couldn't even be dreamed about.
But something else was bugging me. I think it was something to do with the tough talk of investigations by security guards, of cowardly deeds not going unpunished, of making those who did it "pay the price".
The words of an eloquent student of colour in the class the night before were coming back to me. She had pointed out that some of the Whites who condemn these acts most ferociously were sometimes those she saw colluding with the more subtle forms of discrimination she experienced daily. The hurt was palpable as she described being often the last one to be picked when teams were formed, and seeing the ideas of Black students systematically ignored or marginalized. "When at first it happens to you, you don't even notice. After a few times, you want to brush off the idea. But when it happens over and over again, you really start to get it: you're being discriminated against."
I understand the need for the heads of the institution to speak up and take a clear stand against racism and exclusion. It wouldn't be acceptable if they did otherwise. But how much is top-down enforcement at odds with real learning?
And that's when it struck me. Both teaching about human rights and confronting racism involve much more than learning about political science theory and UN instruments, much more than enforcing codes of conduct and international law. What if teaching about human rights and anti-racism work had to involve our whole emotional being, qualities of the heart that we call empathy and compassion?
And if that were the case, how would we teach those qualities?
An article published two decades ago still resonates with me. Entitled "The Excecution Class", the piece was written by Gary Olson, a teacher of International Political Economy at a small liberal arts college. The teacher had suddenly realized that his students were only conforming to his progressive views to get the grades. They had failed to integrate what he thought was absolutely fundamental: more humane perspectives and behaviours. Back in the days of the apartheid system, he conducted a high-impact experiment that lastingly moved and transformed his students. I won't spoil it for you, but "The Execution Class" teaches volumes about innovative classroom methodologies that can reach beyond culturally enforced or self-imposed limits.
The short of it is, human beings are not only brains. The body is not just a head transportation device. To teach the root values of human rights successfully, we need to involve not only the intellect, but also the heart and soul of the students. And that's why successful teaching strategies call for face-to-face encounters, and a quality of emotion that academia is often found resisting, unfortunately.
Teaching about human rights and interventions to combat racism need to rely on real-life experience and collective engagement. Top-down speeches and punishment-driven attitudes can only go so far. To create community, our prime commitment should be to engage ourselves and others in the messy business of being real with other. Otherwise, we risk driving the hate and resentment underground, only to see them reemerge later in uglier, more potent forms.
As we know, violence lies at the root of all human rights violations. To eradicate abuse means bringing forth the deeper parts of our common humanity. And that is bound to generate intense emotional heat. But conflict — which doesn't have to be violent — can provide a top source of learning.
Why so much hate? Why now? Desperate spurts of violence have accompanied all major advances in human liberation. This allows us to see that violence indeed has a purpose. It is only a tool. It is used to enforce power relations — domination and obedience — when other sources of power, such as legitimacy, have dried up. It is the enforcer of last resort, the understood reprisal for breaches of social "order".
And as such, it can sometimes be the hopeful sign that victory is at hand, or that a major battle has been won.
And that's the good news. Drive-by slurs, hanging nooses, firebombs, and torched up cars just won't work anymore. Our African American sisters and brothers ain't gonna turn around no more. With people of all colours, let us go marching together towards the fresh bright rainbows of this new century.
Human rights and the spirit of the nonviolent struggles that birthed them were never just another disembodied academic subject. And that is why they will always need to be taught with our flesh and bones.
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Philippe Duhamel
interTactica — a liberation blog
Please join us in the November 2008 online dialogue on Human Rights in Higher Education: Incorporating practical experience, with resources Abigail Booth and Alice Nderitu from Kenya, Elizabeth Griffin from Costa Rica, Jadwiga Maczynska from Poland
Mingzhen Ge from China, Diane Sisely from Australia, and Barbara Frey, Robin Kirk, Nicole Palasz, Amy Weismann, and Susan Atwood from the US.
