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I'm a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

(New York Times) John McWhorter - In the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, the surrounding noise is infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building, including lusty chanting of "From the river to the sea." I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange and branded as a form of violence. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against Israel's very existence are nevertheless permissible? Conversations I have had place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures - in the form of what they call colonialism and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty are white. Calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It's an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying Hamas as heroes. The protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.
2024-04-25 00:00:00
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