Terror on the Harvard Quad

I didn’t want my students from Racial Passing to feel left out of the end of semester postings. We’ve just finished reading Percival Everett’s Erasure, so here is one for you– from Gawker, by way of Racialicious: “Blacks Terrorize Harvard Students”:

Last weekend, on the bucolic Quad at Harvard University–typically, the site of a casual game of Ultimate, or perhaps an afternoon reading of some Shakespearean sonnets before English class-an unusual and, to some, frightening scene was played out. There were people throwing things! And running! And jumping! And most scary of all, every single one of them was black. So the Harvard students watching from their dormitory windows, growing increasingly agitated at the sights below, did what any normal, white Harvard student would do when they saw a large, seemingly unruly group of black people: They called the cops!

Uhm, what?

And here is some reporting from The Harvard Crimson:

Bryan C. Barnhill II ‘08, president of the BMF, said that police officers asked the students whether they had a permit to be on the field, and left after students explained that they had gained permission.

Barnhill said that many of the participants had been wearing Harvard paraphernalia and the event had been approved by all the Quad House masters. He said the call to HUPD was “disturbing” because of the “assumption that we didn’t belong there.”

Seguing from one of our discussions in the last weeks of classes, I found this story particularly striking. Of course the students who called would never call it racism, because we still often think racism only has meaning in overt violence. It also speaks to how our ideas of race and racial meaning are tied to space: unexpectedly present on the Quad, those black students were not perceived as being the right bodies in the right space at the right time.

But, of course, they are students, meaning they were exactly the right people in their rightful place in the school’s historical and metaphorical center. And it is racist to assume they are in the wrong place, no matter how unfamiliar the scene may seem. If their appearance had been contextualized as a “black event” that everyone knew about, the response may have been the opposite; it’s so great they’re here! But don’ t they too have a right to their randomness? Or is that still a luxury for people of color?

And it is interesting, no? The students on the Quad say that many of them were wearing Harvard clothing. What would it mean to look right at them, but nevertheless manage not to see them as they are? Just kind of being there, playing dodgeball and capture-the-flag; could you get a more Seventh Heaven vision of college?

This is like some post-King, “hey weren’t you going to vote Obama for president?” page out of Ralph Ellison’s prologue to Invisible Man!

But really, Barnhill puts it best:

“In this day and age, racism rears its ugly face in ways that are much more subtle,” he said.

“We just want to show that subtle forms of racism exist, such as seeing a group of black people on Harvard property and assuming they don’t belong there,” he added.

Oh, and by the way, I know Gawker is just being snippy, which is the kind of thing I want from them, but this time, doesn’t their title, “Blacks Terrorize Harvard Students” kinda over-reinforce the race dynamic the article is criticizing?

And the aftermath: here are two more Crimson articles, Ashton Lattimore in an opinion piece, and an Editorial letter.

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