The Ranting of a White Girl Who Supports #ConcernedStudent1950

This rant is part reaction to this article and part critical analysis of some of the arguments made by the writer, Lucky Jo. 

 

For those of you that are lazy AF, I’ll summarize the article real quick for you. Lucky Jo is a student at Mizzou and in her article she expresses her disagreement with Concerned Student 1950, the black activism group on Mizzou’s campus, and her sympathy for President Tim Wolfe. Jo yearns for Mizzou’s campus to be safe again.

 

The first thing to be observed from Jo’s piece is that the daily discrimination and oppression black students face on Mizzou’s campus remains unseen due to white privilege. The first sentence of Jo’s article says, “If someone had told me two weeks ago that my school would soon be on national news for a series of racial incidents and campus-wide chaos, I would’ve asked them what drugs they were on”.  The problem when a white person says this is they are clearly unaware of what is actually happening to black students. The reason they never would have believed someone would say this is because of their white priviledge, where they do not have to worry about the color of their skin on a daily basis. White people are far less likely to think about their race yet some students of color will think about it constantly. This is privilege.

 

The next thing I’d like to highlight as problematic is Jo’s defense of now Ex-President Tim Wolfe. Her argument is that Wolfe himself would not have been able to eradicate racism out of racist individuals, therefore is termination was not just. The students of Concerned Student 1950 were clearly not expecting President Wolfe to suddenly eradicate racism from every person. These students live within a campus climate in which they encounter daily discrimination and racial slurs.

 

This is not something that is new for them and for many before them. 

 

This article is about President Tim Wolfe. In this article, there is a video of Wolfe interacting with what we can assume to be activists. He then says something unfathomable; “systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success”. The people in the crowd rightfully call 

Wolfe out for blaming people of color for structures and systems in place, still into 2015, that continue to privilege white people over people of color.  

 

Much of the uproar around President Wolfe also comes from his handling of a protest situation on October 10th, during the homecoming parade. 

 

This Huffpost article contains a video documenting a group of students from Concerned Student 1950, as they try to highlight incidents of systemic racism from 

Mizzou’s founding (1839) up until present day in 2015. Throughout the peaceful demonstration, many parade bystanders start to yell at the protesters to move on 

and go away. Groups of people start to chant “M-I-Z-Z-O-U” to cover the outcries and message of the groups demonstration. In the video, you can see President Wolfe’s convertible car being blocked, just sitting there and doing nothing in response to the students and doing nothing to dispel the bystanders interrupting the demonstration. In fact, his driver tries to go around them. After these student’s concerns being completely ignored by Administration and other students on campus, students at Mizzou are rightfully upset and angry.

 

Jo is unable to see through her privilege to observe and understand where this anger and passion is coming from. Systematic racism from the slave trade in the 1500’s until present day is a type of oppression that black communities have had to face across the country. These students are justly angry and they are expressing their concerns in a peaceful way. What the President and Mizzou administration failed to do was give a safe space for these students to express their concerns. Instead, they had to create their own space to express their message at the homecoming parade, with the president included in their audience. Jo’s description of Jonathan Butler, the student who fasted for 7 days until the removal of President Wolfe, was “a man who is so deluded and self-involved that he 

actually threatened suicide to get his way”. Butler is not enduring the physical and mental challenges of a hunger strike to simply “get his way”. His goal is to advocate for change in a system that perpetuates white supremacy and blocks the voices of minorities. Influential people like Gandhi have used hunger strikes to communicate important messages in a peaceful manner. The sad difference here is that Butler’s fast could have possibly not been enough to eventually attain the resignation of President Wolfe. What ultimately won over the administration and resignation was the support of the Mizzou football team and coaches, in which they refused to partake in anything football related, including games, until the resignation of Wolfe. This would have been a huge financial loss for the University, and so finally Wolfe stepped down. 

 

One note I would like to make is that if you do not want to be referred to as a bigot, do not say something like, “Freedom, more specifically freedom of speech, is more important than your feelings. Get over it.” (yes, that’s actually something Lucky Jo said…) It is alarming to hear that someone values saying whatever you want to whomever you want over compassion and justice. 

 

My last major argument against Jo’s piece is against her statement saying, “Women are sexualized. Muslims are called terrorists. […] So why is it that Butler gets to choose the importance of discrimination?” The fight for racial justice is not about prioritizing one social issue over another—it is simply one of many movements centered on achieving social justice. It is natural for marginalized groups to speak up about oppression they are experiencing, which is exactly what they are doing. However, I would hope that when a feminist protest pops up on a college campus and gains national coverage that people across the country, whether they are in the oppressed group or are allies, would join in solidarity and support. And that is exactly why black students of Mizzou, and black students across America, need the support and allyship of human beings across the world. 

 

Confront the world and its problems with love and solidarity, and maybe we can fight these evils. Hide away in your privilege and white comfort, and our country, and college campuses, will continue to be torn.

 

And that is why I, a white girl, support #ConcernedStudent1950.