She also used the teachable moment to set parameters around students’ expectations for immediate or unrealistic actions on the part of the institution.
I explained that I did not intend to respond to the demands by item, or to meet each demand as specified, but instead to write a statement that would be responsive to the spirit of what they were trying to achieve—systemic changes that we know we need to make. I also talked about why apologies of the sort that were demanded would be misleading, if not downright dishonest, suggesting, as they implicitly would, that I or the College could make guarantees about things that are much larger than a single institution or group of people. Reacting immediately to strict timetables and ultimatums and speaking in the names of other people and for all times would be a failure to take our students seriously.
President Martin also reaffirmed core principles of the institution—a commitment to a diverse learning environment where all felt welcome and supported as well as a commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression. “The commitments to freedom of inquiry and expression and to inclusivity are not mutually exclusive, in principle, but they can and do come into conflict with one another. Honoring both is the challenge we have to meet together, as a community.”144
With her commitment to establish a committee, inclusive of all key campus constituents, “charged with studying issues of race and racial injury” and to make recommendations to her and the board of trustees, as well as other next steps, the protesters ended the sit-in. They felt that President Martin’s statement had offered “clarification and hope.” In response, they began to rethink their statement of demands, acknowledging the need for “revision and thoughtfulness.”145
The sharing of experiences that was at the heart of the Amherst College sit-in in 2015 reflected a student population very different from that of 1974, when Cullen Murphy graduated from Amherst. In his 2016 essay he wrote, “Four decades ago, when I graduated, fewer than 10 percent of the incoming students were African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, or of mixed heritage. Last year the corresponding figure was 40 percent.” He observed accurately that the protest was fueled in part by “the challenge of fostering community in an environment of diversity,” unfamiliar territory in a society still so deeply marked by segregation.146 In that context, it is not surprising that so much of what was painfully discussed in the library was the discomfort that comes when interacting across lines of difference.
What cuts across the experiences of all marginalized groups on college campuses is the phenomenon known as microaggressions. The term racial microaggressions was first coined by Chester Pierce in the 1970s to describe the daily slights and insults experienced by Black people in the United States. However, the use of the term microaggressions has broadened to include all marginalized groups. Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines the term as “the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group.”147 Often involving the projection of stereotypes, they can occur at any moment of the day, a constant potential source of stress.
When Michael Luo, a Chinese American journalist, experienced one of those moments walking with his family after church on a Sunday morning in October 2016, he posted this message on Twitter: “Well dressed woman on Upper East Side, annoyed by our stroller, yells: ‘Go back to China… go back to your f—ing country.’ #thisis2016.” In another tweet, he wrote, “Now my 7 year old, distressed by what happened, keeps asking, “Why did she say ‘Go back to China?’ We’re not from China.” Later Luo wrote “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China” and, to his surprise, the New York Times published it on the front page.
“Dear Madam,” it begins, “Maybe I should have let it go.”
Turned the other cheek.… But I was, honestly, stunned when you yelled at us from down the block, “Go back to China!”
I hesitated for a second and then sprinted to confront you. You pulled out your iPhone… and threatened to call the cops. It was comical, in retrospect. You might have been charged instead, especially after I walked away and you screamed, “Go back to your fucking country.”
“I was born in this country!” I yelled back.
It felt silly. But how else to prove I belonged?…
Maybe you don’t know this, but the insults you hurled at my family get to the heart of the Asian-American experience. It’s this persistent sense of otherness that a lot of us struggle with every day. That no matter what we do, how successful we are, what friends we make, we don’t belong. We’re foreign. We’re not American.148
In response to his initial tweets and then to his open letter, Luo received a torrent of responses from other Asian Americans who shared similar experiences online. Here is just a sample of those he shared:149
“This has also happened to me… outside my own apartment building. A woman walked right up to me and told me to go back to my own country—a country I’ve lived in my entire life. I couldn’t even believe it and for people who say, ‘they’re just words,’ guess what: Words hurt and I went home and cried that day even though I didn’t deserve to feel sad for being American.”
“Introduced myself to a neighbor and she asked, ‘what’s your real name?’ elizabeth is my real name.”
“As an Asian-American physician, sad to say, I still get this in California: ‘No, really, where are you FROM?’ But at least no one asks me what I routinely got asked on the East Coast: ‘Where did you learn to speak such beautiful English?’ In the NY public schools, just like you. It is a continual reminder that despite being American, in many ways, we will always be ‘other.’”
“Being Asian means putting up with ‘acceptable racism’ in America. I experience an incident a week.”
Luo captured in his open letter the challenge that microaggressions pose to the recipients. The “persistent sense of otherness” that he describes takes a psychological and physiological toll. Social science research has demonstrated that the cumulative effect of microaggressions “assail the self-esteem of recipients, produce anger and frustration, deplete psychic energy, lower feelings of subjective well-being and worthiness, produce physical health problems, shorten life expectancy, and deny minority populations equal access and opportunity in education, employment and health care.”150
As Marcia Chatelain’s essay on Mizzou suggests, the experience of microaggressions is sometimes upsetting not just because it is unpleasant to be called names or yelled at on the street or receive hate mail or threatening phone calls but because it is impossible to know if there is a real threat of harm underlying those words. The fear of physical harm has deep roots in the African American community, with its not-so-distant history of lynching and current concerns about lethal police encounters. In an unexpected way, the presidential election of 2016 has heightened concerns for physical safety in other communities of color as well.
The Election of 2016
When Donald J. Trump announced his intention to seek election as the Republican candidate for president of the United States on June 16, 2015, he launched his campaign with a speech remembered for its anti-Mexican sentiment. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.… They’re sending people that have lots of problems.… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he declared, then adding parenthetically, “And some, I assume, are good people.”151 This was the first of many such speeches in which he linked his campaign theme, “Make America Great Again,” to the issue of illegal immigration, promising to deport anyone who is in the US without proper authorization and pledging to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants across the US-Mexico border by building a giant wall, for which Mexico, he said, would foot the bill.
Prior to this presidential announcement, Trump was known primarily as a billionaire real-estate developer and s
tar of a popular reality TV show, The Apprentice. Because he had no previous experience as an elected official or politician, many political pundits believed he would not fare well against the crowded Republican field of candidates. In addition to Trump, sixteen people had announced they were seeking the Republican nomination, among them very experienced politicians—past and present governors, senators, and congressmen. By comparison, Trump seemed quite unqualified. Yet his initial rise to prominence as a political figure was aided not only by his celebrity status but also by his highly visible support of the “birther” idea that President Obama was not really born in the United States and that perhaps he was really a Muslim. Though neither statement is true—President Obama was born in Hawaii and is a practicing Christian—Trump’s advocacy of those falsehoods attracted the interest of the Tea Party faction of the electorate that held those beliefs and helped create momentum for his campaign.152 Disenchanted with the political status quo, they embraced Trump’s promises to improve their lives by renegotiating international trade agreements, bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, reducing taxes, improving infrastructure, and increasing homeland security—in short, to “Make America Great Again”—but these promises seemed to rest on the prerequisite of keeping some people out of America.153
His anti-Mexican statements, in particular, drew the attention of White nationalists. Two weeks after he made his campaign announcement, he received the endorsement of The Daily Stormer. Founded in 2013 by Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi of the millennial generation, The Daily Stormer is described as “among the most prominent online gathering places for white nationalists and anti-Semites, with sections devoted to ‘The Jewish Problem’ and ‘Race War.’” Anglin liked that Trump was the only candidate “willing to speak the truth about Mexicans.”154 David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and Louisiana lawmaker turned radio host, encouraged listeners to vote for Donald Trump. Other known White nationalists added their support and began to actively engage in the campaign on his behalf. “For the first time in decades, overt white nationalism re-entered national politics. In Iowa, a new ‘super PAC’ paid for pro-Trump robocalls featuring Jared Taylor, a self-described race realist, and William Johnson, a white nationalist and the chairman of the American Freedom Party. (‘We don’t need Muslims,’ Mr. Taylor urged recipients of the calls. ‘We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.’)”155
In the post–civil rights era of twenty-first-century politics, such endorsements would lead mainstream politicians to rebuke them immediately, but that is not what Donald Trump did. When asked about the robocalls in media interviews, his response might be seen as relatively nonchalant. “Nothing in this country shocks me; I would disavow it, but nothing in this country shocks me.… People are angry.” When pressed harder by a CNN reporter on the support of White nationalists, Trump, irritated by the continued line of questioning, replied: “How many times you want me to say it? I said, ‘I disavow.’”156
The phrase “I disavow” is a nonspecific one. Exactly what is being disavowed? The vagueness of this response was seen as covert encouragement to the White nationalists. American Freedom Party leader William Johnson said in a “pro-White” radio show, “He disavowed us, but he explained why there is so much anger in America that I couldn’t have asked for a better approach from him.” Donald Trump endeared himself further with White supremacists through his use of Twitter, often retweeting messages that have been posted from nationalist Twitter accounts with racist or anti-Semitic content. “When Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Mr. Trump’s Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts.”157
It became clear that Donald Trump’s campaign was giving new mainstream visibility to a movement that for many years had been in the shadows of American life. What is sometimes referred to as the “alternative right” (shortened to “alt-right”) is defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”158 Those who identify with the alt-right are characterized by their heavy use of social media and online memes, their rejection of traditional conservatives as weak, and their embrace of White supremacist nationalism as a fundamental value. Much of their rhetoric is “explicitly racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist.”159 Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” and has been its most visible spokesperson, has said that Donald Trump should not be considered alt-right but that “white identity” is at the core of both the so-called alt-right White nationalist movement and the Trump movement, even if most Trump voters don’t articulate it in that way.160 Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent civil rights organization working against anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, speaks for many when he says he is troubled by the “mainstreaming of these really offensive ideas.… It’s allowed some of the worst ideas into the public conversation in ways we haven’t seen anything like in recent memory.”161
Not only was Trump’s promise to build a wall between the US and Mexico a prominent feature of every campaign speech, on December 7, 2015, in response to Islamic State–linked mass shootings in Paris that killed 130 people on November 13 and a domestic terror attack that took place in San Bernardino, California, three weeks later, Trump announced that he was “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”162 Many of Trump’s fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, criticized him for this proposed ban, so contrary to the principle of religious freedom in the US and so unfairly stereotyping the millions of Muslims around the globe (and in the US) as potentially dangerous terrorists. His rhetoric represented a distinct ideological shift within American politics.
Candidates from both parties have courted Muslim voters for years. President Obama and President George W. Bush frequently described Islam as a peaceful religion marred by extremists. Republican governor Chris Christie gained the respect of New Jersey Muslims after standing up for his appointment of a Muslim lawyer to the Superior Court in Passaic County and dismissing concerns expressed by some conservatives that the jurist would enact sharia law as “crap.”163 Nevertheless, polls indicated that a majority of Republican voters supported the idea of a ban on Muslim immigration, and they began to rally in even greater numbers behind Trump’s candidacy.164
Trump’s list of controversial statements continued to grow, not limited to Mexicans and Muslims. During the campaign, he was captured on videotape making a speech in which he imitated a journalist with a physical disability in a mocking way. He made insulting comments about the physical appearance of women, including one of his Republican rivals, Carly Fiorina. He encouraged African Americans to support him by describing them as a group stereotypically (and inaccurately) confined to a hellish existence in inner cities: “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed.… What do you have to lose?”165
Particularly disturbing to many was the way he seemed to sanction violence among his supporters (most of whom were White) when anti-Trump protesters (often people of color) appeared at his rallies. Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd in Iowa, he said, “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees, I promise. I promise.” At a rally in Michigan a month later, when a protester caused an interruption, he said, “Get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court.” At a North Carolina rally, he said, “See, in the good old days this didn’t use to happen, because they used to
treat them very rough. We’ve become weak.” It was at that rally that a White male Trump supporter sucker punched a Black male protester in the face as a security guard was leading him out of the arena. Later, when Trump was asked by the moderator during a Republican debate if he was condoning violence at his rallies, Trump’s first response was to express admiration for the passion of his followers. “When they see what’s going on in this country, they have anger that’s unbelievable. They love this country.… There is some anger, there’s also great love for the country. It’s a beautiful thing in many respects. But I certainly do not condone that at all.”166
Even in the face of his controversial statements and bellicose style, or perhaps because of them, his popularity continued to grow. One by one, the other Republican candidates dropped out of the race. By May 4, 2016, Donald Trump was the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.167
On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had been locked for months in a fierce contest for the Democratic nomination. By the summer of 2016, however, it was clear that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic choice to run against Donald Trump in the November 2016 election. Donald Trump would accept his party’s nomination at the Republican convention on July 21, and Hillary Clinton would accept the Democratic nomination on July 28. But before either convention took place, the nation’s attention was once again turned to lethal violence involving Black men and the police.
Within the space of three days, eight people in three different cities died in high-profile incidents. Thanks to cell phone video and social media, we again became a nation of eyewitnesses.168 The first two deaths, that of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and that of Philando Castile near St. Paul, Minnesota, were all too familiar—Black men shot and killed by police under very disturbing circumstances. In the case of Alton Sterling, two officers had him subdued and pinned to the ground when one of them took out his weapon and shot him in the chest.169 What we saw on video looked like an execution. The killing of Philando Castile began with a traffic stop for a broken taillight. When Castile responsibly informed the officer that he had a lawfully carried gun in the car, the officer responded by shooting him seven times, fatally wounding him. Castile had made no threatening moves, never reached for the weapon. Witness to the shooting was Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter, who was seated in the back of the car. Reynolds streamed the heart-wrenching aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live with her cell phone.170 In response to these new incidents, a peaceful protest organized by a local minister, head of the Next Generation Action Network, was taking place in Dallas on July 7, 2016, when a sniper opened fire, killing five Dallas police officers: Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa. The shooter, a Black army veteran named Micah Johnson, was not affiliated with the protesters, but his stated motive was one of retaliation for the police killings of Black people. He too was killed. Johnson’s attack on the police was described as the deadliest for law enforcement officers in the United States since September 11, 2001.171
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