We asked for four and a half minutes of silence to symbolize the four and a half hours that an unarmed, facedown, dead Michael Brown was left in the streets of Ferguson, MO. A police officer had shot him six times. And we asked for four and a half minutes of respect, four and a half minutes of silence. Often, white silence is deafening. Last night, I could have only wished for it.
Trust me, I understand if people were confused and expected to go to Primal Scream, get drunk, and have a good time running naked around the Yard. It sounds liberating and it sounds fun. People want to have fun, and I get that.
The day after the protest people tell me: well, we would have supported you if we had known. Or, why can’t we have our fun and protest too? Protest later? Protest anywhere but here? Why didn’t you tell me? If you had told me nicely, maybe I would have joined you.
To that I say: it’s cute that black lives matter when it doesn’t inconvenience you. I find it fascinating that people are willing to march around Boston, through Back Bay and Roxbury, shut down the T, shut down the highways, shut down intersections, make society stop working for a night. It’s fine when it’s not us. Tell me, is Primal Scream more valuable than someone’s commute home? For parents, for children, for taxi drivers, for people with real jobs? It is the ultimate in elitist snobbery to say that inconveniencing the Boston working class is more useful than inconveniencing Harvard “fun.”
“Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Let me tell you something about Primal Scream: it is a symbol of all the glorious decadence we get to enjoy by being Harvard students. Break as many laws as you want on Harvard’s campus. Administration will ignore you, the police will shut down the Yard for you, and everyone will get to bathe in each other’s hedonism. It is a night of debauchery that we get to enjoy with all the privilege that we have.
So for everyone who said, “I didn’t know about it”—would all of you have protested with us had you known? Would you have given up your privilege to run wild that night to have a die-in with us? Or would you have then said, “it is not the right time or place”? Would you have then said, how is this my fault, and why should I have to give anything up? Why me? Why sacrifice?
I am angry that you are having fun. I am angry that we get to have fun while every 28 hours another black person is shot by the police. And I’m so angry that we don’t see it that way.
The truth is, it’s giving things up that upsets people. To get justice, it might take the interruption of their own lives. True allies actually give things up. They give up money, they give up time, and they give themselves. They bail protestors out of jail, they go to jail, they get an arrest record, they refuse to work for racists, they call out their racist friends, they don’t let anyone get away with anything in front of them. They work.
It’s too easy to say #BlackLivesMatter. Of course they matter. But if the only time you talked about it this week was when we delayed your fun for a full five minutes, this protest did more than its job. It shamed you. And if it didn’t shame you, you’re not an ally—you’re part of the problem.
The thing is, Harvard is part of the problem. I’m part of the problem because all non-black students are. We enjoy privilege more than we can imagine, we feed off the decadence the Harvard name gives us, and we revel in the whiteness this institution is steeped in. Harvard could not exist without slavery, yet almost no black people are celebrated throughout this University’s halls and portraits. For hundreds of years, black students have experienced harassment, discrimination, violence, profiling, disgust, ignorance, dismissal and so much more. So I, frankly, don’t care if you had to wait five minutes longer for your Primal Scream. We only asked for four and a half.
Being drunk is not an excuse.
Being unaware is not an excuse.
It’s never been an excuse.
It’s time for all of us to do better.
© 2024 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved.