Early on the morning of April 9, an altercation occurred in Lewis Hall that shook the Tufts community to its core. First, accounts in the Daily referred to an "alleged bias incident." In student op-eds and on various sites on the Internet, controversy swirled about whether the event was indeed primarily racist, or even racist at all. Some saw the problem instead as drunkenness, others as violence. There were many who complained of overreaction to a commonplace, if particularly ugly, act of discourtesy.
I'm a white male of 61 who, with the exception of about two years total of study and travel abroad, has spent his whole life in the United States. I read the flurry of publications that appeared just after the incident occurred. By now, I have also read the confession from the white student involved, the concerned students' open letter to University President Lawrence Bacow, the formal agreement between the parties, the response of Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman and the reflection of a handful of administrators led by the president. It turns out the incident did involve racial slurs, drunkenness, discourtesy and some violence. It is also the case that the white student will be disciplined. But, as I see in the paper and on the Internet, disagreement remains about what makes the incident so unsettling. A few have even suggested that the issue of race has been tendentiously used to turn a blunder into an act of racist hate. Because of this disagreement, I thought it might be of interest to see how a person like me reads the narrative of what happened in Lewis Hall that early Thursday morning. My reading is, of course, an attempt at understanding from the point of view of someone with my mind and my experiences. Since I'm white, and the freshman at the center of the altercation is white, too, my point of view may just reveal something about his on that day as well.
Looking at things as if from behind the freshman's eyes, this is what I see. I'd be entering a room with about a dozen people in it, all of whom, I noticed from the very start, had Asian faces. One of the first things any of us picks up about anyone we meet is that person's apparent race. When whites meet whites, the fact may not consciously register. When whites meet people of color, they take note right away. It's often the first thing a white will say about the other person in any later reference to the event. In this case, I would also notice that some of these people were dancing. Their moves were unfamiliar to me. Otherwise, why would I push myself in among the group, attempting to imitate them and insisting that they teach me the steps? All the dancers were Asian males. Since I started calling the moves "the gayest s--t I've ever done," I was probably already feeling my own superiority over the dancers. "Gayest s--t" is never used by people of the freshman's age group to refer to something they like. It's a put-down, with homophobic overtones. It is definitely not something I would say in this particular context unless I was feeling especially safe and privileged, among people I didn't mind offending.
What happened next probably took me by surprise. First, I was asked by the dancers to leave. When I gave no sign of doing so, I was asked again. Privilege and superiority almost immediately gave way to rage and to thoughts of violence. I probably made a move to intimidate my confronters, pushing one or two about. The result was a bit unexpected, even alarming. The dancers began some pushing and shoving of their own. Before I knew it, one had me in a headlock while others pinned me to the floor. I began to feel scared. I screamed out that I couldn't breathe.
Fortunately, my antagonists all released their hold. It was, of course, time for me to leave. My friends, who'd been standing watching all the while, realized that and helped by pulling me away. Things hadn't happened the way I wanted. The rage was still in me, the same clear knowledge that these were all Asians I was dealing with, and a little shame that I had come off so poorly. At least I had the language of the American street on my side. "You f--king chinks, go back to China." To assure myself, and perhaps even my antagonists as well, of my privilege, I added a touch of commonplace xenophobia: "Go back to your f--king country; you don't belong in this country." Since by now I viscerally despised these people, I started spitting.
Behind the eyes of the Korean-Americans and Koreans, I can imagine that some things looked the same, others quite different. First of all, we would have noticed a white male, drunk, coming into the room and going straight at us. We would also have guessed that this person didn't care if he offended us, in fact apparently assumed that he could inconvenience us with impunity. Here was privilege, a lot of trouble, and maybe even danger, too. By his dance imitations and what he said, this white male made it clear he looked down on us, probably even felt a kind of macho superiority. We had to find a way to stop what was going on.
It wasn't really surprising that our efforts to get this guy to leave were met with anger, obscenity and even schoolyard threats. The spitting did catch us off-guard. When he started pushing and shoving, our own rage had already begun to rise. While he lashed out, we grabbed him, pinned him down and held him tight around the neck. Only his cries that he couldn't breathe cut through our anger. We let go; he backed off, and his friends did their job by helping to take him away. Then, of course, it came. Somehow we knew it was on the way, but to hear it made us gasp all the same. "You f--king chinks, go back to China." Before we even had time to think about the stereotyping that made our actual ethnic heritage irrelevant, there came the words of exclusion. Exclusion even here in our own university. "You don't belong in this country."
Back to me, the 61-year-old who wasn't there. Chances are that my imagination has gotten some of the details wrong in both my "behind-the-eyes" accounts. But I would bet that neither is very far from the mark. Too often, I've lived through similar episodes or witnessed something like it. Too many friends and non-friends have told me about their own analogous and unsettling experiences. At the very least, I advance it as a plausible reconstruction.
What my reconstruction makes me think is that, regardless of the incivility, the drunkenness and the violence, it still is the racism that deserves our closest attention in all that happened that Thursday morning in Lewis Hall. And I believe that as we examine our own reactions of the past weeks and in the coming months, it is by our response to the racism that we should expect to be judged. A community of people living and working together and committed to giving all its members the respect that each deserves cannot rest easy when such a scenario unfolds within it. Any of us in such a community reluctant to take effective and unambiguous steps to see that such an encounter does not recur — and that all on campus recognize the intolerability of racist acts among us — are simply putting in doubt our willingness fully to belong to the whole. So far, I have seen few among the student body, but maybe more importantly, even fewer among the faculty or the administration — all the way to the top — who have done much to remove this doubt. That is surely the saddest thing about this profoundly saddening story. I hope that by the fall, Tufts — administrators, staff, faculty and students — proves itself readier to become the amicable and equitable community that, as a university, it ought to be.
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Steven Marrone is a professor in the Department of History.
