Reflections from the Inside
Where Do We Go From Here?
Nicholas: This semester, we’ve been trying to capture the essence of student advocacy and activism in our column. This has been, in part, a selfish project. While we hope our words have had some small impact on our readers, we also know that they have helped us come to terms with our own identities as student advocates and activists. We have developed our own conceptions of and philosophies on the work we do in the public eye. We have learned about the history of our work, and contemplated its future. We have become better public servants for writing this column.
And yet this semester the two of us decided to quit the Undergraduate Council, the primary platform of our public service. There are multiple reasons for this decision, but perhaps the most pressing is also the most simple, and most selfish: We are tired, and the work we do isn’t sustainable. In this column we’ve discussed the weight that pain and exhaustion place on activists. And now, that weight has—not forever, but for now—gotten the better of us.
What About White People?
Nicholas: For the past few years, the two of us have worked on numerous policies intended to benefit the lives of students of color at Harvard. One question we’ve been constantly forced to answer is: “What will these proposals do and mean for white students?” We’re told that we have to convince our opponents that white students will gain, rather than lose, something from these policies. While we seek to push for an act or movement that is explicitly designed to benefit students of color by alleviating white supremacy, we are forced to reassure white Harvard—who is privileged by this systematic white supremacy—that our liberation attempts are to their benefit.
Salma: In my experience, social change is, at its core, an alignment of self-interests: Those who have power remain apathetic or in opposition unless their self-interests line up with the self-interests of those who are pushing for change.
The Radical Road to Reform
Salma: As we’re writing this, we’re counting down the hours to a long awaited meeting with Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana, Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion Roland S. Davis, and Associate Dean of Student Engagement Alexander R. Miller about our UC Proposal for a Physical Space for Belonging on campus. Throughout the process of advocating for this space, we’ve received a lot of feedback on our methods; surprisingly, mostly praise comes from people who commend us for being “reasonable enough” to be willing to sit down with administrators, to work towards a solution that is moderate enough that works for all of us—“reasonable enough” to compromise. With these comments often comes an implicit disdain for other people “constantly yelling on the steps of University Hall”, placing us above them in their strange mental rankings of who does advocacy work best. We’re pushing back.
Nicholas: This is not an apology for Black moderates. In-system reform work too often is a perpetuation of the status quo, becoming an insidious way for structures of oppression to sustain themselves. But, Salma, I don’t think either of us would fit into any definition of “moderate.” For every person who’s praised our “sensible” strategies, there’s a Crimson commenter accusing us of inciting race wars. For every time we’ve sat down across from a dean to hash out policy details, there’s another when we can be found chanting in the streets. We are not unique in this regard. Black activists constantly toe the line between working in- and out-of-system, because Black radical activism must balance our end goals—a world severely, radically different from the one we live in—with the complexities and nuances, the limitations, of the here and now. Both our detractors and our supporters must accept this fundamental ambivalence in Black activism.
Before the Rage
Nicholas: To be Black in America is to be traumatized; not all at once, but little by little, stretched out over every day of your life. Stretched and minimized, because the trauma is not an event; or rather, it’s an event that predates our individual Black bodies, the seismic rumbles of some cataclysm that occured in the dawn of our history and rumbles in the back of our brains. Which is to say that it’s generational, which is to say it forms us in the womb, and we emerge caught up in it. Which is to say that America is a bed of Brown and Black trauma, and to be born Brown and Black in that birthing bed is to be traumatized.
This sounds abstract, but it’s not. This trauma is visceral, and it manifest in daily pain, like so much crystal-cold water drowning us slowly but surely. This is what we want to focus on: Pain, real pain—the real pain of being of color in this country. To bring it even more down to earth: What we’re talking about is mental health, the mental health for which this university purports to be on a crusade. But what it, and this world, fails to understand is that for people of color, mental (un)health is synonymous with racial trauma. And the two of us, as student activists, have a particular relationship with this mental (un)health.
Whose Speech is Protected?
Nicholas: Last semester, the two of us—with some wonderful friends and partners—organized a counter-rally against Charles A. Murray ’65, the (blatant) white nationalist that the Open Campus Initiative saw fit to bring to campus. A major criticism against our protest was that we were trampling over the free speech rights of Murray and OCI, a critique made doubly damning in the minds of our opponents due to OCI’s purported purpose to “test free speech” by inviting “controversial speakers” to Harvard. We were failing that test. We were proving OCI and its followers right, that Harvard’s leftist snowflakes just couldn’t take the “intellectual discourse” guaranteed by free speech values.
Salma: As the students who were organizing the counter-rally, we were catapulted into a national debate about freedom of speech on college campuses. The debate has been framed as a binary: You either defend freedom of speech or attack it. You either sit back and watch silently, complacent as Murray is invited to campus or you’re childish, unwilling to listen to differing opinions, labeled as unreasonable. Through our response to Murray’s campus invitation, we attempted to introduce more nuance into the conversation and to challenge that binary which has been eternally rigged against us.