While the anger that charged the events leading to the premature end of Ray Kelly’s lecture yesterday was justified, holding the intellectual rights of fellow students hostage was not. Wrestling Commissioner Kelly from the stage stripped other attendees of their right to listen and moreover, undermined the goals outlined by the protestors themselves. The demonstration was a profound misunderstanding of the lecture’s purpose, and by extension, an oversight of more powerful alternative responses to racial profiling. It puts thousands of Brown students in a box without their consent. A coalition largely outnumbered by the student population – bolstered by activists completely unaffiliated with Brown – should not be able to limit the right of everyone else to hear political viewpoints, even problematic ones. To do so is to cast doubt on the intellectual capability of one’s peers to further understand the reasoning behind these policing strategies, and then to decry their injustice.
The disruption empowered a few voices at the expense of silencing many, and unnecessarily so, because the voices of the protestors certainly could have been heard on terms respectful to the free speech of other students attending the lecture. Such an outcome is unacceptable in any intellectual ecosystem that values collective growth. The school’s reputation as a bastion for open-mindedness now appears sullied, but it’s important to recognize that this action is by no means indicative of the university as a whole.
Marian Orr, the director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy, has devoted the entirety of his twenty-year academic career to researching the plight of marginalized communities in urban politics. According to Jamelle Watson-Daniels ’16, who spoke to Professor Orr shortly after the lecture was cancelled, “As a black man, and also as an intellectual specifically studying strategies of political change, his hope was that Commissioner Kelly would be challenged by the intellectual capacity of individuals who are at this school.”
Though the Taubman Center framed the event poorly and failed to explain in concrete terms their motives for bringing Kelly to Campus, it was clearly not Orr’s intention to offer the Commissioner a one-sided platform to condone systemic racism.
The director’s introductory words alluded to the philosophy of Alexander Meiklejohn, an alumnus, former dean, and the namesake for Brown’s first-year advising program. Meiklejohn espoused the right of everyone to hear all viewpoints, believing that change arises through informed intellectual discourse, not through stifling offensive or ignorant opinions. Even if Commissioner Kelly’s “proactive” policing strategies are implicitly racist, outwardly suppressing bigotry breeds the most inwardly stubborn form of obstinacy. When racism is not publicly confronted, it doesn’t disappear, it festers within. Therefore, to compel change requires adopting the bigot’s terms for debate: listening to his logic, even if it may be perverse. Without that understanding, both parties harden in their respective corners, looking down on one another, refusing to search for common ground. Discourse with Commissioner Kelly does not lend legitimacy to his racism; it’s the only tool that can aptly fight it. Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio cannot simply refuse to engage his opponents on stop and frisk, however unreasonable their stance. His campaign staff knows that without dialogue, a more humane policing policy will never come to fruition.
While challenging Ray Kelly in a Brown lecture hall is unlikely to engender change in the NYPD’s policing strategies, silencing his side of the story nonetheless impedes the evolution of public discourse. Offering Commissioner Kelly a public forum with a designated space for questions would have assured the audience exposure to the best arguments for his policies, and just as importantly, the best refutations thereof. The demonstrators directly hindered their own cause by robbing attendees of the opportunity to fully inform their opinions and thus become better advocates for minorities oppressed by systemic targeting. Instead, driving him out of town empowered Ray Kelly with further ammunition to label the community ignorant.Protesting racially motivated policing strategies deserves admiration. So does a candlelight vigil expressing solidarity with minorities victimized by discrimination. But infringing upon the intellectual rights of others by drowning out a speaker in the midst of expressing gratitude to the family of a deceased alumnus is unacceptable. Of equal concern, the protestors’ incendiary chant branding the entire NYPD as racist, sexist, and anti-gay verged on slander, and conflated the police force’s orders with their personal morality. For the same reasons that we reject Kelly’s policy of generalizing people of color, we should not generalize the work his staff does for the city of New York. This is not a black and white issue, and the police force is not black and white either. Not long ago officers wearing that uniform plunged into the smoke of burning towers felled by terrorists to save the lives of helpless New Yorkers – men and women, white and of color, gay and straight alike.
Demonstrators justified their behavior on the premise that Ray Kelly’s policing practices don’t even merit debate. Why is that value judgment theirs to make on behalf of Brown as a whole? How is it remotely possible to draw a clear standard for when it is or is not legitimate to suppress speech, if indeed some viewpoints are offensive enough to warrant such extreme retaliation? And what exactly did shouting down Ray Kelly accomplish, beyond fostering a widespread discussion of this community’s values?
During the anti-apartheid movement, beloved former president Ruth Simmons faced a comparable predicament. As the fiercest of advocates for marginalized communities, she initially refused to listen to a fellow student’s argument for apartheid. Her 2001 inaugural speech expressed remorse: “I have never forgotten these simple words spoken in opposition to my own. They taught me more about the need for discourse in the learning process than all the books I subsequently read. And I have regretted for 30 years that I did not engage this woman’s assertions instead of dismissing her as racist.”
Brunonians, we can do better.
Dear Jamie,
You write that the authors “will never understand the pain caused by racial profiling and police brutality because the color of your skin gives you infinite access and mobility.” If I were a white man married to a black woman and my son had dark-skin, would I not be empathetic to his suffering?
You write that my “privilege” as a white alumnus will allow me to continue to say and do whatever I want and whenever I want. That’s not true. We have laws to prevent abusive power and discrimination, namely the Fifteenth Amendment and many add ons.
You clearly support the suppression of free speech if one disagrees with the speaker. In essence, you have dissed the First Amendment of the US Constitution. My Father-in-Law, a refugee from Nazi Germany and now a successful lawyer, schooled me that the ACLU defended Nazis on their right to walk down the main street of the Chicago suburb Skokie which had a large Jewish population. Free speech is not always pretty, but it certainly trumps your flawed intellectual argument. Had the speaker been today’s Frederick Douglas and white skinheads had shouted him offstage for being against Stop & Frisk, would you still feel the same?
By never giving the speaker a chance to be heard, you couldn’t use your intellect to slice and dice his arguments. Perhaps you may have learned that there is a compelling reason for Stop & Frisk? Perhaps people of color do benefit from the policy? Perhaps his speech would have furthered the dialogue on the right to carry a gun in the first place?
But, we will never know, and the outcome has been a disaster. The protest has sullied Brown’s reputation for openness and intellectual rigor. And, it has provided more press to Ray Kelly and likely an uptick in support for Stop & Frisk.
Respectfully,
David Ray ‘84
Chair, Brown Club of Oregon
This article was clearly written by two white students who haven’t thought about the privileges their bodies afford them.
To the authors: you mention an issue of protestors putting thousands of Brown students “in a box without their consent.” You need to consider the millions of people of color who are are violently affected by the racism of stop-and-frisk and other policing policies throughout the United States, all too often resulting in the physical harm or murder of people of color. This is not a “box,” this is systemic oppression. I can’t sympathize with your uncomfortable feelings regarding some sort of label that may or may not have been placed on you as a Brown student because that is not oppression. You need to consider that you will never understand the pain caused by racial profiling and police brutality because the color of your skin gives you infinite access and mobility.
You also need to consider that this protest was not conducted solely by Brown students. Members of the community of Providence, many of whom have been racially profiled in the city in which you live, were active in the organizing and execution of this protest. But you live high on a hill within the walls of an Ivy League institution that allows you to completely ignore the politics and experiences of people living in Providence. By completely removing them from your “analysis” of the protest and implying a claim that members of the Brown community were the only people affected by it, you have ignored and belittled their voices just as Brown did by inviting Ray Kelly to lecture.
Ray Kelly’s voice was not suppressed because protestors prevented him from speaking at one lecture on one day of his life. His body and his power will allow him to continue to say and do whatever he wants whenever he wants.
Your voices were not suppressed because protestors prevented you from access to your apparent “intellectual rights” on one day of your life. Your privilege as white American citizens, students, and one day alumni of Brown, will allow you to continue to say and do whatever you want whenever you want.
Your quest to intellectualize stop-and-frisk policies through a “discourse” with Ray Kelly epitomizes your privilege. People of color affected by these policies are not afforded the chance to intellectualize racial profiling because it threatens their bodies every day. “Intellectual rights” don’t exist. You’re talking about intellectual privilege.
Your article has discounted the experiences of people who do not fit into the ever-so-comfortable “box” that you live in as white Brown students. Your use of the term “minorities” others people of color who do not share the privileges afforded to you by your bodies.
I know, you weren’t trying to be racist when you wrote this article – you were trying to use your right to free speech and express your opinions! But there are implications embedded in your language and approach that are harmful to people marginalized by the color of their skin and whose right to free speech is systemically violated day after day.
Before you continue to take up space in this dialogue, you need to confront your privilege, accept that it informs your views, and listen. Not because it will enhance your “intellectual” experience, because learning from other people’s plight is NOT a right. But rather, because you are engaging in a discussion of people’s real lived experiences and oppression for which you cannot speak. To intellectualize this conversation is to deny the humanity of people marginalized racist policies in this country and in the global community.
Hi Jaime, thanks for your feedback.
While I certainly understand that I write from a privileged perspective, my demographic doesn’t automatically strip me of the right to an opinion. I fear that you conflate my disapproval of the protestors’ methods with either an objection to the protest’s message more generally or a demonstration of support for Kelly’s policing strategies. I want to emphasize that neither interpretation is accurate. I sympathize deeply with victimized minorities targeted by stop and frisk policies, though I’m well aware that without first person experience, it’s hard to fully grasp the nature and scope of their oppression. For this very reason, I strongly oppose Kelly’s policing tactics, agree with the reasoning of the judge that ruled stop and frisk unconstitutional, and support protesting Brown’s decision to bring him to campus, especially given the Taubman Center’s inability to clarify their motives for inviting him to speak.
That said, I think many of your concerns could have been addressed without shouting down a speaker in the midst of thanking the family of a deceased Brown alumnus.
“Ray Kelly’s voice was not suppressed because protestors prevented him from speaking at one lecture on one day of his life.”
The crux of our argument is that suppressing Ray Kelly’s voice was problematic primarily because of its ancillary effect on the right to free speech of other Brown students in the room. You aptly raise the point that, “people of color affected by these policies are not afforded the chance to intellectualize racial profiling because it threatens their bodies every day.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’ve heard the grievances of many students of color on Brown’s campus offended by the circumstances of the protest precisely because they’re unable to confront the institutionally discriminatory strategies of the police on a daily basis. Drowning out Ray Kelly robbed them of a rare opportunity. Despite the flawed nature of the Taubman Center’s platform, it afforded people of color in the Brown community a venue to air their pain and frustration directly to its source, in a confined space in which he was forced to listen. The intellectual rights to which we refer are not exclusively our own, but most importantly belong to individuals wronged by institutional discrimination who wished to address the force behind their struggle face to face and were stripped of their only opportunity to do so. Tangentially, as I hope I conveyed above, hearing the best (or at least the most carefully worded) justifications for stop and frisk and subsequently witnessing a member of the community dismantle those arguments has power beyond the immediate exchange itself. It empowers everyone in the audience to become the best possible advocates for the institutionally oppressed.
Moreover, intellectualizing the conversation is the only means to procure change. As I implied above, whether it’s fair that stop and frisk is a debate or not, the actors with the power to adopt more humane policing strategies perceive it as such. Ray Kelly justifies his policies primarily on their potential impact to reduce crime (however shaky and unsubstantiated that claim may be). Bill de Blasio cannot shirk his responsibility to engage proponents of stop and frisk if he hopes to make any meaningful difference in reversing institutional oppression. Perhaps I wasn’t clear in the body of my opinion: I definitely think it’s unjust that a group subject to generalized discrimination needs to engage the institution responsible for that abuse in order to uproot it. But the system isn’t structured fairly and refusing to debate stop and frisk does nothing to broker progress, even if it mobilizes the community wronged by it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think bringing Ray Kelly to campus merited protest, just not on these terms. The demonstration outside of the lecture hall was powerful, as were the signs displayed within it, with the notable exception of the “racist, sexist, anti-gay, NYPD go away” chant, which I found profoundly disrespectful and misguided. Still, sending a message that Kelly’s policing strategies (and the spin-offs they inspire) oppress and dehumanize rather than protect and serve didn’t require a presumption on behalf of the rest of the community that this event lacked value.
Lastly, operating under the assumption that the opinions of some speakers are too offensive to grace this campus, the question becomes where do we draw the line? When is it not okay to forcibly cancel a lecture organized by the Brown administration or one of the academic departments? Is the existence of a coalition large enough to shout down a speaker sufficient to justify that behavior?
To speak of the protesters as “silencing” Kelly’s viewpoints is to ignore the structural and historical contexts of what constitutes “silencing.” Everywhere he goes, Kelly is given a podium and a microphone. His policies have spread across the US. Meanwhile, those who are victimized by unconstitutional stop and frisk policies are systematically disallowed from speaking. No microphones, podiums, or honorariums are given to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been wrongfully and unconstitutionally stopped and searched based on the color of their skin.
A Q&A between Kelly and students is not equal discourse. Kelly is one of the most powerful men in the US; he is at the head of America’s largest police force; he was accompanied by administration and police officers to protect him and ensure his control of the speaking floor. This is not an equal forum. Furthermore, there is a qualitative difference between a class discussion and an endowed lecture. In Simmons’ class discussion, the University did not provide the white student with a microphone, podium, and honorarium, nor did it place her in front of a ten-foot-tall Brown logo. Kelly, however, was given these things by our University. The idea that any sort of equal discourse is possible in that situation – or that equal discourse was the goal – shows a profound misunderstanding the history of race and power in this country.