George Zimmerman Emerges, Endorses Campus Vandalism

April 10, 2012 in Administration, Campus Life, Police, Race, Violence | by | 4 comments

Utterly bizarre, yet somehow unsurprising.

George Zimmerman, the self-proclaimed neighborhood watch leader who shot Trayvon Martin, has made his first public comments since the killing, on a website he’s created “to provide an avenue to thank my supporters personally” and solicit funds for legal and living expenses.

One page of that website is a photo album “dedicated to persons whom have displayed their support of Justice for all.” At the time of this writing, the album has just two pictures in it — an image of a poster reading “Justice for Zimmerman” and one of the words “Long Live Zimmerman” spray-painted in white on a red brick wall.

That’s right. George Zimmerman, the guy who once called the cops on a group of kids popping wheelies, is now thanking supporters for vandalizing a building on his behalf.

And it’s not just any building, as it turns out. This particular pro-Zimmerman graffiti was scrawled on the side of Ohio State University’s black cultural center last week, in an incident that the university’s president denounced as racially motivated.

Not long ago, Zimmerman’s defenders leaped to condemn Trayvon Martin over allegations that he once drew on a school locker. It’ll be interesting to see what — if anything — they have to say about Zimmerman’s public embrace of vandalism.

Update | As the blog Plunderbund notes, the “Long Live Zimmerman” graffiti went up on the night of April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Happy Birthday Paul Robeson, the New York Times’s Favorite Giant Negro

April 9, 2012 in History, Media, Race | by | Leave a comment

A couple of decades ago, Spy magazine pioneered the Nexis search as journalism — they’d gin up a query and publish the results as a chart in the front of the book, telling you (for instance) which dozen outlets had recently described vaguely blond public figures as Robert Redford look-alikes. (The LA Times said it of Cary Elwes and Fortune of Dick Gephardt in mid-1989.)

Nowadays, full-text newspaper archive searches let you take the game a step further, going beyond Nexis as journalism into the realm of Nexis as history. So when the late David Mills of Undercover Black Man went digging a few years ago, he discovered that between 1897 and 1968 The New York Times deployed the phrase giant negro on more than a hundred occasions.

Think about that for a moment. America’s paper of record found more than a hundred reasons to refer to black men as “giant negroes” in the 20th century, and they didn’t stop doing it until the late sixties.

Most of the Times’s giant negroes appeared in crime reporting, where they could be seen Attacking Police, Going Mad On Liners, or merely In Prison, but a few — like five-time NYT “giant negro” Paul Robeson — won lasting fame. Robeson received the GN treatment four times during the course of his college football career, and got a final nod in the 1926 write-up of his London stage debut in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. (Robeson, of course, would go on to a world-changing career as a singer, actor, and activist. He  was only six-foot-three, by the way, and weighed just 190 pounds when he enrolled at Rutgers.)

David Mills did a whole series of Giant Negro posts back in 2007, and they’re all worth reading. I can think of a lot worse ways to celebrate Paul Robeson’s birthday.

Junior High Students Pepper-Sprayed for Dawdling Between Classes

April 9, 2012 in Civil Liberties, Middle School, Police, Violence | by | 15 comments

At least three young people were treated at a local hospital Thursday when a police officer working the hallways at Jack Robey Junior High School in Pine Bluff Arkansas pepper-sprayed a group of students returning from lunch.

School superintendent Jerry Payne told the Associated Press that the officer used the spray because, in AP’s paraphrase, “students weren’t getting to class quickly enough.”

One mother, a volunteer at the school, says her daughter’s face swelled up as a result of a severe allergic reaction to the spray, requiring her to be hospitalized for several hours.

The Pine Bluff Police Department has issued no statement on the incident, which took place four days ago. A local television station has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the officer’s Use of Force Report.

Pitt Bars Transgender Students and Faculty from Gender-Appropriate Bathrooms

April 8, 2012 in Administration, Faculty, Gender, Litigation, Town and Gown | by | 1 comment

Last fall a student at the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt-Johnstown campus was banned from the men’s locker room at the university gym. The student, Seamus Johnston, is listed as female in the university’s records, but has been living as a man for three years and carries a driver’s license identifying him as male. When Johnston refused to comply with the ban, he was brought up on campus disciplinary charges and arrested for disorderly conduct.

In February the Pitt Anti-Discriminatory Policies Committee (APDC) issued a unanimous ruling opposing Johnston’s ban and calling on Pitt to craft clear policies on the use of bathrooms and locker rooms. Those new policies, announced last month, require all Pitt students, faculty, and staff to use bathrooms and locker facilities consistent with the gender assigned on their birth certificates.

This policy puts many transgender members of the Pitt community in an extremely difficult — and potentially dangerous — position.

By state law, Pennsylvanians may receive a driver’s license bearing a gender other than that assigned at birth on presentation of a reference from a doctor or counselor specializing in transgender issues. The federal government has issued passports on the basis of similar documentation since 2010. And the NCAA allows transgender athletes to play on teams reflecting their gender identity after one year of hormone treatment. But Pennsylvania state law mandates gender reassignment surgery before amending a birth certificate.

Under Pitt’s new policy, then, a student enrolled in college as a woman, listed as a woman on her driver’s license and passport, playing women’s sports for Pitt or a visiting team, would be barred from changing into her uniform with her teammates if her birth certificate did not declare her to be female.

And some states — including Ohio, Pennsylvania’s neighbor to the west — do not permit amendment of birth certificates for any reason.

The whole situation is a huge mess. Students, who were not consulted on the ruling and have not yet been provided with it in written form, are up in arms. Transgender faculty have announced that they will defy the ban. And the chair of the city of Pittsburgh’s Commission on Human Relations believes that the ban is a violation of city law. Pitt’s student newspaper lambasted the “bizarre,” “despicably self-serving” way in which the decision was made and announced, saying the decision showed “the University’s blatant disregard for its transgender students” and for the student body as a whole.

University officials are refusing to comment.

Update | I want to say a little more about this.

Until now, Pitt’s policy on gender and bathroom/locker-room use has been to address the issue on a “case-by-case” basis. That can mean a lot of things, of course, and it has the big drawback of not providing trans folks with reliable, predictable institutional backup, but as an approach — at least in the abstract — it has the virtue of recognizing that the relevant questions here are questions of interpersonal dynamics, not taxonomic order.

If you think about it for even a moment, the reason why the Pennsylvania DMV and the State Department have issued progressive policies on gender and ID becomes obvious: The point of identification is to identify you cleanly and clearly. If you consistently present as a man, and your driver’s license or your passport identifies you as a woman, that’s going to cause all sorts of problems — not just for you, but for police, bureaucracies, businesses, everybody. The vast majority of the time a person is out in the world, nobody has any reason to know or care about their biological sex. It’s just not relevant.

And it’s no more relevant in the bathroom than it is at the airport or in a traffic stop.

The DMV and the State Department have both come to terms with the fact that prescriptive, mechanistic policing and enforcement aren’t viable responses to the lived realities of gender expression in 21st century America. Here’s hoping Pitt figures that out sooner rather than later.

The US Student Association Enters the Occupy Era

March 27, 2012 in Students | by | 2 comments

The United States Student Association’s Legislative Conference is not a place where you expect people to get arrested. Each year several hundred students from across the country, many of them elected representatives of their campus student governments, gather in a DC hotel for a weekend of speeches and workshops on federal legislative issues. On Monday they head to the capital to make their case to members of Congress in one-on-one sit-downs.

This year was a little different.

The student government leaders were there as always. There were the lobby role-plays and the legislative fact sheets and the mediocre hotel food with the worse than mediocre vegetarian options. But at this, the first USSA national gathering of the Occupy Wall Street era, there was something else as well.

Workshops on campus organizing took up more of the conference schedule than they have in the recent past, and even panels on electoral work carried titles like “Occupy the Ballot.” A workshop on “radicalism in the student movement,” led by a new USSA staffer, drew a large and passionate crowd. In formal sessions and in the hallways, a newly activist mood was palpable.

That shift in mood reflects the shift that has taken place in the country and in American higher education in the last five months. Occupy didn’t begin with Occupy Wall Street, and in fact some of USSA’s most prominent campuses in recent years have been the UC schools where the current wave of campus occupations began in the fall of 2009. But the spirit of Occupy was more broadly felt this weekend than at USSA’s recent conferences.

USSA has always been ideologically diverse, and that hasn’t changed. The students at the conference included conservatives, moderates, liberals, and radicals. And in fact the shift that took place more a shift in focus than a change in ideology — a new interest in direct action, a new sense of possibility for student empowerment, a new sense of crisis and urgency.

The Monday of the long Legislative Conference weekend is always a lobby day, and this year as in years past hundreds of students took to the Capitol building to meet with their hometown legislators. But yesterday the trip to Capitol Hill included a detour — a visit to student loan giant Sallie Mae. USSA’s students were denied entry at the corporation’s headquarters, so they sat down in front of the building, some blocking the street. Ultimately three dozen activists were arrested, including USSA’s president and the heads of the student governments of several major universities.

For a street demonstration in the age of Occupy, this was relatively restrained — an act of polite civil disobedience rather than a defiant occupation. But it was a dramatic departure for USSA, and the participation of many of the organization’s most visible leaders indicates the extent to which it reflects an ongoing shift not only for the organization, but for American student activism more generally.

This bears watching.

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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