Deans’ Message: With Thanks for the Voice of the People
With Thanks for the Voice of the People
Dear Community,
We write with gratitude for the strong and important letter that you wrote to the three deans. Such a thoughtful letter deserves a response, which we offer here, but we want to begin with our genuine appreciation for your willingness to write this. We are listening carefully, albeit imperfectly, to the pain, anger, hurt, sadness, and harm that you express, both in your letter and in other recent moments in our community life. We honor you for being your honest selves, and we lament the enormous harm that you have experienced, some caused by the violent deaths in our society in the past two months, some by the decades and centuries of US and global violence, some by the appearance of Ben Shapiro, and some by the responses or non-responses of your deans. We deeply regret that harm and hurt, and we are actively planning opportunities for the community to share their responses and reflect together in what you have aptly described as a “community dialogue in which our community can process, grieve and respond.”
The most immediate hurt has been caused by the presence of Ben Shapiro on the BU campus, but we are surrounded by other examples of racist legacies, violence run rampant, and the destruction of lives that do not fit white heterosexual norms. We recently mourned the police shootings of Bennie Branch and Atatiana Jefferson, and their deaths are tragic reminders of the vulnerability of black and brown bodies. Of the 783 police shootings in the US thus far in 2019, the numbers of African American and Latino/a deaths continue to be out of proportion to the population of the country, 158 Black and 127 Hispanic or Latino/a. Our society violates children and young people every day, whether in direct shootings or in cultivating a sense that violence is a cure for personal and social ills. Today we have witnessed yet another school shooting in which a young man shot his classmates and then turned the gun on himself. Police shootings and school shootings – all shootings – need to stop.
In such a fraught world, any speaker who feeds divisiveness and speaks without honest recognition of the legacies of slavery, racism, able-ism, poverty, sexism, and heteronormativity will perpetuate the legacies. We disagree with Shapiro’s message and believe that America was indeed founded on slavery, and on genocide, and that continues to shape racist attitudes and ideologies. To claim that America was founded on freedom as a way of denying these realities is not only misleading and distorting, it is immoral.
You have offered two critiques that we think deserve attention: 1) STH administration should have taken some form of public action against Shapiro’s visit, and 2) our ‘failure’ to do so represents a hypocritical and cowardly (“head in the sand”) abandonment of our school’s professed identity and mission as a school of the prophets. We would like to share with you why we made the choices we did, but with full awareness that we might have been wrong.
In response to the first critique, we have two thoughts. First, Shapiro was invited to campus as a part of a student-organized event. As university faculty and staff, our relationship to students is not one of equal power. We think it highly inappropriate for us to utilize the power of our positions to condemn students or engage them in a confrontational manner. We have no problem with their peers doing so. But, we think it is unfair for faculty and administrators to “punch down” by issuing a statement against the decisions of a student group. Second, we did not speak publicly about the event because we did not want to give Shapiro any more recognition than he was already getting. We don’t think that ignoring what we identify as “hate speech” is always the right strategy for working toward racial justice. To the contrary, we think that confronting and rejecting such speech can be the most powerful action that one can take in the cause of justice. However, in the case of Shapiro, we do not see him as an influential thought leader whose ideas must be denounced lest he win the day. We think he works through insults and seeks influence through his ability to elicit visible and vociferous dissent, which he can then portray as a sign of his stature. Thus, we really believe that the most effective way to counter his hate speech is to ignore him, while continuing our work of telling a different story more loudly and more forcefully than he is telling his.
This leads us to the second critique – that we retreated from our legacy in some way. The student letter invokes King’s witness as a part of their critique of our actions, but one of the critiques levied at King was his insistence on choosing his antagonists carefully. Other activists, especially students, often thought him weak or too gradualist because he didn’t respond or react to every indignity or mobilize in the face of every injustice. The SCLC received countless requests to get involved in local fights over various forms of segregation. But, they carefully refused the fights that would unnecessarily elevate antagonists whose stature was too low to make a significant structural impact. Prior to any nonviolent direct action, they conducted power analyses and identified the key centers of power that they wanted to target and topple for maximum impact. If an antagonist was not deemed worthy of the effort, they ignored them so as not to magnify that person’s impact. They may not have always been right in their determinations about what to fight and what to ignore, but making the determination was itself a mandatory part of the ongoing fight for justice.
Leaders in the Civil Rights movement also knew that different people occupied different roles within the fight. We think the very existence of differences touches on the theological question of what “prophetic” means. We think people often reduce that concept to confrontational protest and dismiss the constructive work of community-building and cultural transformation that is actually at the heart of the biblical witness of prophetic ministry. Along with the theological question of what prophetic ministry is, we would add the practical question of how to achieve your aims. We three do not think that the best way to combat hate speech is to prohibit it; because it just goes underground and festers. We think that you combat lies and distortions with truth, and you need to hear truths from every direction. You can’t restrict hate into non-existence. You have to overwhelm it under the preponderance of love.
We are expressing our perspectives here, but we do not think that our answer will suffice as a response to your letter. It did not satisfy King’s detractors either. But, it’s what we believe, even as we know that we may be wrong.
We close again with appreciation. Your letter not only levied a strong critique, but you suggested a constructive way forward. We will be having the community gatherings that you have wisely requested, and we expect and hope that people will express their honest and diverse views there. Students who wrote and signed the letter have already expressed themselves with power. We have also shared ourselves honestly in this letter, not to ask you to agree but to invite you to ponder your own concerns and views. Our STH community is on a journey to deeper understanding, not just to listen to the sounds of our many voices, but to hear as deeply as possible the hurts and passions that people carry. To do this is to journey with Howard Thurman in the “search for common ground,” where agreement will never be found but where dignity, mutuality, and genuine transformation abound.
With appreciation and hope for important conversations ahead,
Teddy Hickman-Maynard
Bryan P. Stone
Mary Elizabeth Moore