Ryan Fukumori

n Wednesday, September 26, 2007, graffiti was found in a bathroom of the School of International and Public Affairs. It read:

The following night, the Black Students Organization (BSO) called an emergency town hall meeting. Over 120 students – overwhelmingly students of color – from a wide swathe of communities and organizations packed Lerner C555 to show support and express their unease and outrage. Some saw a definite corollary between the graffiti and the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad two days earlier, which had provoked national outcry, a media firestorm, and an on-campus protest speared by the multipartisan Columbia Coalition. Muslim Students Association (MSA) President Adil Ahmed describes the graffiti as partly a consequence of the University’s failure to “[protect] groups on campus that could be affected by the reactions to [Ahmadinejad’s presence].” The values that underlie administrative action for Adhmadinejad’s visit, Ahmed maintains, also authorize broader intolerance.

Ahmed was not the only one to argue that the graffiti has its genealogy in past events. Many students saw it as the latest in a protracted series of hate incidents: in 2004, a string of episodes, including an anti-affirmative action bake sale and a racially inflammatory comic strip in the Fed, led to protest in front of Low Library and the formation of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. In the fall of 2005, racist and homophobic graffiti found in a Ruggles suite ignited similar responses and led to the creation of Stop Hate on Columbia’s Campus (SHOCC), a group whose demands ranged from curricular reform to anti-oppression training for all incoming freshmen. Student responses at the town hall were in line with past reactions to hate incidents on campus. Pointing beyond the incident itself, they contextualized it as part of a greater institutional racism, instantiated in the western bias of the Core Curriculum and lack of administrative support for Ethnic Studies programs.

University President Lee C. Bollinger has been asked about systemic prejudice at Columbia before. His responses have been, and continue to be, problematic -- and deeply illustrative of why many students don’t believe that Columbia has institutionalized intolerance. In a conversation with the Spectator on October 11, Bollinger said, “I think these [bias incidents] are committed by individuals who violate norms that are deeply held and subscribed to by our community. I do not think they spring out of a kind of racism or anti-Semitism that is pervasive or systemic in the institution—I think the institution deeply embraces and meaningfully embraces these norms and acts on them in all kinds of ways, in thousands of ways.” Bollinger is obviously right, in one sense: when the graffiti was discovered, students reacted with indignation, and their indignation was proof that Columbia students do share a kind of racial and religious tolerance.

Public response to the graffiti showed that the community can unite in a cursory condemnation of a showy, obvious act of racism. Bollinger’s argument is that Columbia “utterly rejects and acts on its rejection of racial and ethnic and religious hatred,” and that intolerance is atypical: racism on campus is committed by a few racists, but not endorsed by the community. But when students dismiss the creation of SHOCC, complain that protests responding to hate incidents are a nuisance, and fail to cover student of color issues in the campus media with accuracy and rigor, they show that racism at Columbia is not the work of a few anomalous people. The fact that the Core Curriculum marginalizes minorities, and that the alternative content and pedagogy offered by Ethnic Studies is underfunded, undermines what Bollinger calls our “deeply held” values, and they reveal other, more troubling, deeply held values that aren’t atypical at all, but are ingrained in campus culture. No wonder that the initial reaction of Crystal Tang, Co-Chair of the United Students of Color Council, was “outrage and disgust that this was happening again at Columbia.”

Students took immediate steps at the town hall meeting, organizing a walkout and rally for the following Monday, October 1. The date had special significance: November 1 was also the national day of action to demonstrate solidarity with the Jena 6 -- the six black high school students from Jena, Louisiana, charged with attempted murder for the assault of a white student after a noose was found hanging from a tree on their campus. Organizers called attention to the connections between the SIPA incident and the situation in Jena, stressing the ubiquity of racism and the universal need to oppose it. Indeed, the email that BSO President Tiffany Dockery sent on September 27 notifying students about the graffiti had declared, “In light of these current events on our campus, we must remember We All Live in Jena!” And to Destin Jenkins, BSO Political Chair, “the two issues are, in essence, one and the same.” National demands from the Jena 6 mobilization, including the call for the charges against the Jena 6 to be dropped and for the expulsion of the school district superintendent, were integrated into the demonstration.

At noon on October 1, over 150 students amassed at Low Plaza. Wearing black, they met beneath an archway of rainbow-colored balloons celebrating the kickoff of Queer Awareness Month -- the Columbia Queer Alliance had offered the space for the protest. The crowd was studded with signs and banners: one decried racism “from Jena to Columbia”; another, echoing Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed that “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Students marched in procession up Broadway, across 120th Street, and down Amsterdam past SIPA itself, chanting, “What do we want!? JUSTICE! When do we want it!? NOW!” and “Hey hey! Ho ho! Racism has got to go!” The march ended back at Low Steps, where rally organizers led protestors in a call-and-response chant, quoting Malcolm X: “We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

Following the event, organizers stressed the need for continuity, collaboration, and further initiatives. Tang highlighted the importance of unity between like-minded student groups beyond immediate reactions to specific incidents; only then, she argues, will they “build up a community of people who feel accountable to each other.” She also expressed concerns over problems with the University’s communication to the student body regarding hate incidents. Tang’s criticisms were echoed at a Common Meal sponsored by the Office of the University Chaplain on October 11. At the dinner, titled “United Against Hate,” student objections to President Bollinger’s delayed response, and his characterization of recent events as “bias incidents” rather than hate crimes, received enthusiastic applause. Tang argues that the administration’s “lack of response—directly affects the campus atmosphere that allows these actions to materialize,” and stresses that “a change needs to happen at an institutional level—[in] rethinking how this University is accountable to its students.”

Nevertheless, a positive outlook was apparent after the November 1 protest. Ahmed’s response: “I know there is a lot of Islamophobic sentiment in the public, yet I’m also optimistic to get a big response and attract a large number of groups to unite.”