Opinion

Letter to the Editor: Decrease the hate, don’t decrease the speech

By Alexa Merriam ’17

February 13, 2015

“You can shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” said Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. A kid like Jem or Scout listening to Atticus’s words in Alabama during the Great Depression would have discovered the impossibility of hitting a blue jay with a BB gun despite the large population of blue jays and the white people they represent. Jem and Scout watched Atticus nobly defend the innocence of Tom Robinson, the primary figurative mockingbird of Lee’s novel, in a futile court case.

During turbulent times when Robinson’s fate of being shot seventeen times is strikingly similar to the fate of too many unarmed black and brown people in the United States, it can be hard to realize an attack on one minority, one innocent mockingbird, is an attack on them all. The Islamaphobic comments in the Enquiry issue published on January 26th generalized an entire group of people as violent extremists, ignoring the tendencies of various other religions and social groups to resort to violence.

As a white person on this campus, I do not think about my ethnic background as often as some of my peers. During Hamilton’s Ferguson Die-In protest this past fall, I recoiled when I heard Utica policemen threaten to arrest anyone who was willing to go to jail for the issue of unjust verdicts and police brutality against people of color. I will never forget that day for as long as I live. Alhough I am white, I am a woman, and I am Jewish. I do not experience anti-Semitism here, but I am aware that the anti-Muslim racism that has been a recurring problem since 9/11 is not unlike the hatred my ancestors felt during WWII pogroms. I am a minority of a different category, and in the words of Audre Lorde, “there is no hierarchy of oppression,” so I can empathize with my friends who have been directly hurt by the Enquiry’s ignorant writing.

However, an attack on one minority is not only an attack on them all, but also it is a call for everyone, including those who are privileged, to respond. Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on November 5th, in which Obama stated “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ,” demonstrated the power of history; learning the facts of the past and understanding the reality of the present is imperative in order to disillusion Americans to the lie that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Like mockingbirds, children imitate ideas and behaviors without fully comprehending the meaning of such ideas and behaviors.

But the speech is not the problem. Let the mockingbirds sing and have their freedom of speech. Shutting up racism, classism, etc. is not the answer. You can only fight such evils with education and intelligent argument. To create a safer, happier campus climate, it is our responsibility to recognize acts and words of hate and counteract them in a way so that those who come in contact with such acts and words realize that such is hate, not truth.

—Alexa Merriam ’17

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