Campus Engagement: Take Back the Night

Unlike previous years of my involvement in Women's Studies, I intentionally took a very active interest in participating in Take Back the Night. I went to a NOW planning meeting for preparing the banner previous to this actual event and learned that the new focus of Take Back the Night was going to stress violence against people, not violence against women, a marked change that I personally deeply appreciated. My specific purpose in attending was to table for YAYA, so my experiences were primarily shaped by my goal of fundraising and interacting with my immediate community in search of donations. In this way, Take Back the Night is an ideal event, both for tabling and for campus engagement, because so many of the people I care for and appreciate most in the progressive community were there, offering multiple opportunities for connection and education about YAYA and our class project.

Not surprisingly, my favorite aspect of the evening was Claudia Schippert's speech on gender/racialized violence. Much of her speech mirrored a talk we had in Queer Theory that morning about our text, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, which discussed the case of "mistaken identity" when Sikhs were killed in Islamaphobic hate crimes during the immediate days after 9/11, due to the "shared" possession of turbans. There is something very wrong when in an effort to construct oneself as the mainstreamed, harmless brown person, one must also buy into and continue the perpetuation of another as the legitimately threatening other, yet fear does terrible things to people. This echoes Geraldo Rivera's victim-blaming comments about Trayvon Martin and his hoodie, which in his mind, were intended to protect black and brown boys through pragmatism, but instead, put the burden of proof on each of their individual shoulders to tow a line of white, middle class respectability, just in order to not be taken as a serious threat to all those around you. As Schippert pointed out, Zimmerman probably did see Trayvon Martin as a genuine threat because he interpreted a complex matrix of social and behavioral cues to conjure the image of a hood rat kid "up to no good." His overzealous vigilanteism is protected by lack because this racism is so deeply imbedded into the culture as to be unconscious and possibly not even outwardly malicious, making it even more insidious and different to detect. Worse than that, we are all implicated in this system of violence, as it operates with and through risk cues that cause each and every person, especially women, to constantly create a hierarchy of how threatening a person or situation is, often perpetuating racist stereotypes in the process. Meditating on this recent violence makes the need for cross-cultural understanding even within local communities so much more obvious and urgent.

Word Count: 463.