In defense of Professor Andrews, who called for a ‘steep and lasting price’ to be imposed on students who invited Milo Yiannopoulos to campus

Emma Downey, noted campus activist and organizer of campus-wide walkouts, shares her thoughts

In light of a recent Breitbart article, and the summary of it by The Tab, and subsequent slew of Facebook shares with alarming comments, I felt compelled to voice an alternative assessment of Professor Marcellus Andrews’ letter, diction, and intended message.

I believe Professor Andrew’s letter, sent to faculty, was not meant to target the Conservative Club of Bucknell. Instead, I found it was a reproach for the people who sit in bathroom stalls carving quarter-sized swastikas into the walls.

It was meant for the closet racist, normally silent, who gets a little too loud at Town Tavern and blows his cover. It was meant for the children raised by parents who, like students Professor Andrew’s mentioned, feel it is acceptable to urinate on a human being because of their skin color.

These people are what the rhetoric of Milo Yiannopoulos and his cohorts give confidence to. The email the Breitbart writer received was written by a black man. A black man who is also a Yale educated, respected, tenured professor that attended college in a tumultuous time of prejudice and racism. During this time, one of the only effective defenses for black citizens from racist attacks was physical self-defense.

Professor Andrews

Just as the Black Panthers carried arms and patrolled neighborhood police officers to protect the black community from the high rate of racist-motivated police killing of black citizens, protection had to take the form of active self-defense. Reasoning with a racist could get a black man killed. It was necessary to (at the time), as Andrews said in his email, “to rearrange a few faces, snap a few bones” in order to “change the behavior of some folks.”

In my opinion, Professor Andrews is not threatening violence, he is describing self-defense. The difference between physical violence, and verbal violence (in the form of hateful, anti-semitic, white-supremacist, racist, and misogynistic rhetoric) is verbal violence acts upon the mind.

To be a person of color, Muslim, LGBTQ, low income, female or any other category that doesn’t fit the white cis gender upper-middle class paradigm of a Bucknell student, the heartfelt welcome of Milo qualifies many of the fears a marginalized student may have had about the views of their classmates, peers, administrators, and educators.

The author of the Breitbart piece, who introduced last night’s guest speaker, Christina Hoff Sommers, asserted though he did not think Professor Andrews’ letter was meant to threaten conservatives or libertarian students directly, “it could have been interpreted that way.”

Two points on this note: First, ‘could be interpreted’ is a luxury. Jewish students do not have this luxury when they see a swastika carved on the bathroom stall. They know the message, the powerful hate behind the symbol, and the rhetoric it encapsulates, as do all minority groups. Second, the same argument can be made about how students of color, women, LGBTQ, muslims and other “outcast” groups feel the remarks of Milo could be interpreted as threatening, racist, hateful, and violent.

The speaker concludes with remarks about how the administration handled Professor Andrews’ letter, saying the administration “accepted Professor Andrews’ cheap explanation that by ‘impose a steep and lasting price’ he merely meant that marginalized students were to engage me in calm and peaceful discussion.”

The hypocrisy is this is what the conservatives use in their arguments for bringing speakers like Milo to campus: a way to facilitate discussion, and hear the other side. If students like the Breitbart writer feel threatened by a black professor peacefully writing emails directed to marginalized groups in an attempt to inspire them to reclaim oratory space on their campus and combat racism, perhaps the administration should do something. Perhaps we ought to provide them a safe space free from contradictory ideas or minority viewpoints that might make them feel uncomfortable.

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