Tag: Authority

Unrelated events in North Carolina?

Evan at GuilfordIn as many weeks, two events in North Carolina that seem completely unrelated hit me hard.  The first began on Tuesday, February 3rd when this article about Guilford College came through my feed.  What I read both thrilled and disappointed me.  First, I was thrilled to learn that Steven Salaita, a man I know only through his tweets, had been invited to speak at my college.  I particularly appreciate how Steven draws succinct parallels between the history of colonialism in this country and the present reality of colonialism in the Middle East. He does so with poise and poignancy, and it has cost him a job.  Secondly, I was disappointed to hear that his talk had been moved across campus to avoid a building named for a wealthy donor who took offense to his views. The news source is not known for journalistic nuance, but I knew that the story was larger than this one event.

In my last year of college at Guilford, a school known for its peace-loving Quaker heritage, three Palestinians were jumped and viciously attacked on campus by members of the football team.  Tensions had been high everywhere then, with the Iraq War going badly and a color-coded threat system the only thing we had to show for September 11th.  Since August 2006, we’d seen several months of tense altercations and verbal threats by American students directed particularly at two Palestinian students.  Except for some slaps on the wrist, these events received little public administration recognition before the attack in January 2007. I’d worked with one of the Palestinian guys in September to write his version of an earlier altercation where he’d ended up insulted and pushed, and these are his words:

“Before [the attacker] came to us, [we] were discussing what had happened off campus and how a lot of ignorant people call us “Terrorists” and call me “Osama Bin Laden”, just because of my name and where I come from. Calling me a terrorist is an assault on my dignity, my hopes, and everything that I have worked for in order to build peace here in the United States..”

On the night of January 20th, a group of football players attacked the two Palestinian Guilford students and their visiting guest with chains and brass knuckles, hurling anti-Arab, Islamophobic slurs.  We knew at least the visitor was hospitalized with serious injuries but once again, college administration was mum and treated the incident like any other weekend-brawl. My friends were “hardly innocent victims” and the alleged perpetrators, who carried out their attack in the middle of residence hall surrounded by witnesses, deserved “due process.”  I was a member of the Guilford Judicial Board, a body working with the administration to air student grievances in sensitive judicial cases, but the Board was informed we would not hear this case (just as we had not heard any others that year). Students organized forums and vigils. The athletic department, long at odds with the naive Quaker peaceniks on campus, refused to address the issue of violence or Islamophobia on the football team.  While the school issued private judicial decisions in the case (which resulted in both victims and perpetrators leaving campus) the local DA dropped all charges, students graduated and the college moved on.  I mentioned it the college President before his retirement last year and he was as dismissive then as he’d ever been about “the Bryan incident”, as it came to be known.

Guilford appointed a new president this academic year and by all reports she’s a great person.  Since I figured she might be more open to hearing my two cents on the college’s legacy surrounding Islamophobia than her predecessor, I wrote her a letter the day of Steven’s talk telling her about “the incident” and contextualizing her recent decision.  Within just a few days, she sent back a very thoughtful and sensitive response, consistent with the prevailing Quaker attitude, that all campus voices needed to be respected and that she aimed to address the discomforts of both donors and some students by moving the talk.  I responded reiterating my key point was not the feelings of any given student or donor today but rather the legacy of Islamophobia that had never been addressed in the 8 years since a hate crime took place on campus.  On February 6th I wrote:

I witnessed a lack of public administrative response to an unprecedented hate crime exacerbate a (perhaps temporary) climate of fear on campus, but more importantly give a public impression Guilford ignores Islamophobia and the dignity of Palestinian students…I wrote to you after reading once again about the perception my college disrespects Palestinian voices in a nationally-distributed article.

I haven’t heard back.  Just a few days later, three Muslim students were killed at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Now, the University of North Carolina is absolutely a different school.  The students in question were Palestinian-Americans, allegedly killed by a neighbor, not another student. (note: in an earlier version of this post I was not aware the students, often referred to as “of Syrian and Jordanian descent” were actually American citizens originally of Palestinian descent via Jordan and Syria.) Rather than never explaining motivations for the violence in 2007, the authorities attempt now to explain the killing of these students by saying the alleged killer is either insane, a lone wolf, or is double parked.  Isn’t that just code for saying there are no lessons to be learned from this tragedy?  I’m not suggesting that we necessarily could stop anyone from killing anyone, but I’ve watched willful ignorance on the part of administrators at a institution of higher learning leave an open wound fester. Tensions are high again now, with the Levant wracked again with violence of our own creation and vitriol as bad as it’s ever been.  Today one can even tweet hate.   Schools could be a place where understanding and restorative justice are modeled, not just marketed.   I watched this lesson missed once, and I fear it will be missed again.

As I sit typing, my wife is studying again beside me for her college classes.  I see her work and I remember just how much a college or university demands of their students.  Being a student of a particular school, even if you have a losing football team, inevitably shapes a student’s identity in addition to giving them an education.  A student doesn’t just spend time in class but also in meetings, talks, eating in the dining hall, with friends, defining one’s identity around an institution every day for years.  Don’t schools then have a mission to care for and protect all their students then?  Perhaps this is just because I went to a religious school, but setting aside the obvious failures of the State in this regard, don’t colleges and universities have an obligation to address not only their student’s comforts and intellectual environment, but also their values? Are these event so very different and how can we stop them from happening again?

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My Grandfathers, My Privilege

The woman arrived late for Quaker worship and quickly rose, prefacing her message with: “I can assure you this is spirit led….” She spoke at length about white privilege, systematic injustice, the civil rights movement, the death of Micheal Brown and her recent visit to Ferguson. I didn’t catch the whole message because a Friend needed an urgent ride home and when I came back she was still speaking.

As I returned, I watched her through the half-light doors of the meeting, catching snippets of “reparations” and “brutality” and “mass incarceration” through the cracked doors, waiting to reenter without disturbing worship. Folks shifted in their seats and many were already disturbed.  Eventually a Friend stood and asked that the speaker allow for some silence to consider her message.  She broke into song, spoke a practiced “don’t silence me” line and sat.  I returned to my seat and mulled what I’d only half heard.  I was bugged by the break in norms, but sometimes we can use a shaking up in meeting. I agreed with parts of her message, but the delivery was rambling. At the end of meeting she confirmed “her mission,” spoke briefly with supporters and was gone.

Missing most of the actual message, my churning emotions about policing, racism and my own privilege lead to my grandfathers:

My dad’s dad was in the New Jersey State Patrol.  He’d retired by the time I came around, but his official patrolman’s portrait used to hang in the garage “to scare the rats away.” I’m certain my Pop-Pop felt what MC Killer Mike said about his father: “Being a cop must be hard. My dad was one, and never wanted any of his children to follow in his footsteps.” I knew he was sent Newark in 1967 during the riot there, but that topic was as off limits as discussion of the South Pacific beaches he’d crossed as a Marine.  Near the end of his life, I asked him if he’d ever shot anyone.  He avoided the question. I think of the words Killer Mike adds: “The police have the power of life and death in their decisions — they need to know that Americans hold them to a higher standard than these examples, of American men laying lifeless like deer.” I think of my own standards as his grandson: how can I evaluate his service, knowing so little but also fearing to know more?  Perhaps for some people it’s enough to know he served in uniform, especially as a white man, but I still want to find a lesson there.

My mom’s dad Jack was the Quaker, the one who’d gone to Europe in the war and came back resolved to changeMe and my brother with Grandpa Jack, 1987 things. While I’ve heard a little more about his military experiences, the message in our family was that everything after his return was meant to transform the violence.  He’d moved my mom and her siblings to a majority-black school district in the 70’s to sensitize them to the importance of race relations. The most vivid images of this experience have come from his kids stories though, and they describe getting beaten up by black classmates and fear. At least that’s what’s come across to me.  Somehow listening to their old vinyl of “Inner Visions” or hearing about their biracial foster daughter doesn’t really round out a picture of systematic change to me.  He’d also done American Friends Service Committee work camps around the country rebuilding poor neighborhoods. At Thanksgiving this year I found a picture of him at one of those work camps.  He’s dressed in a shabby work outfit handing a bemused looking older black woman a glass of milk on a plate. I guess.  It looks even more staged than my other grandfather’s State Patrol portrait, and gives little sense of reparations or restorative justice. What is his lesson of transformation?

I ask myself:  Didn’t all three of these people believe they were being of service?  Their methods differed, but it seems to me the self-styled agitator in meeting, the white man and his burden, and the tight-lipped officer all wanted to make things better.  What I wonder is whether their service could have been better put to use in a broader community, a beloved community. It seems like accountability was missing in all their examples, that accountability white folks are regularly reluctant to give up. If you bring a message to worship meant to change things, can you really expect anything if you leave right away?  If you followed orders you regret, can you heal or be accountable without telling anyone what happened?  If you wanted to transform pain and violence, can you succeed without accountability to those you “serve”?

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Adoration and Authority

I spent a few days this last week in the Alps with members of my wife Federica’s Catholic community, the Pope John XXIII Association (APGXXIII), on a spiritual retreat.  We stayed in a beautiful hotel built for disabled teens by the community founder, Don Oreste Benzi, who called Catholics to serve the poor and marginalized as a basis of their spiritual discipline.  I’ve had a few other experiences with “the Community” in my various visits here (one described here) and even Italian Quakers, but this was my first real opportunity for corporate intercultural, interreligious dialogue in this place I may one day call home.  (Of course I’ve also only just reached a capacity in Italian to make this possible. Even now, a fail-safe uncomprehending but interested smile helps fill in the inevitable lulls. )

The format of this retreat was the first thing to strike me as different.  I was blessed to attend my first New Year’s Silent Retreat hosted by Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting this January, and I suppose I had expected a similar approach here.  When Quakers talk about silence, we really mean silent.  This spiritual retreat last week, called a “desert”, was decidedly more “reflective.”  While Federica assures me there are more silent “desert” experiences organized by the APGXXIII community, I found the stereotypical boisterous Catholic milieu natural considering the communal, Mediterranean sensitivities of the faithful here. An interesting exception is the rite of  “Adoration”, in which gathered worshippers pray or sit silently in somewhat improvisational fashion before the consecrated host.  The Eucharist is truly the manifest Christ as the focus of Adoration, in much the same way we Friends seek and occasionally transmogrify Him invisibly in worship.   For someone unused to Catholicism’s highly organized worship, good-natured arguments on the liturgical calendar, and tactile sensibilities, Adoration made me feel suddenly at home and also strangely uneasy. Whenever someone sang or vocalized a prayer during Adoration, I’d think “Ok now, HERE’S where we get back into the program,”  or as silent seconds turned to minutes I’d ask myself “Can I really settle in now?”

A nightlong vigil before the host offered me the opportunity to pray in complete silence, before the Christ both within and without, unconcerned with possible interruptions.  Somehow this felt sheltered, contrived.  It made me think of the folks at meeting who rush to turn off the coffee pot if someone accidentally tries to turn it on before worship.  Isn’t Christ always present and available to us, regardless of outward distractions?

Another fascinating exercise at this desert where discussions by the priest on aspects of this year’s community theme of “obedience.”  This is definitely a term we Friends struggle with, as do the fairly radical members of this community.  Obedience is considered not just obedience to outward authorities within the Church, but obedience to the needs of the poor, the Jesus’ call to action, to individual leadings and vocation.   I did find the discussion on obedience to outward authority one of the most interesting, especially as the key thing Friends chose to renounce when we went our separate way.  The priest spoke about how we are called to challenge our authorities within the faith, fervently and clearly, but that once a decision has been made by those above us in the Church we are bound to respect and abide by it.  We could be surprised or even confused by the result.  He used the example of how when St. Francis was inspired to form a new order, he began to put the pieces in place but quickly went to Rome to ask for the Pope’s blessing.  Apparently there is a famous Italian film in which St. Francis is depicted approaching the Pope at the time, known as corrupt and dripping in gold and jewels.  The gathered priests and cardinals turn up their noses at the ragged, dirty monk as he approaches the throne.  Though he had prepared a lengthy appeal to ask for the Pope’s approval to form this new order, upon approaching His Holiness he threw all caution to the wind and ad-libbed a passionate but humble request to re-imagine the Church’s calling.  The rest is history, though the key part of this story for the gathered community members was the Divine inspiration that moved the apparent monolith of Church Authority.  I mused to myself:  What if we Quakers tried to make another visit to the Vatican, to see if our approach to things could be recognized by St. Francis’ namesake?

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