What We Talk About When We Talk About Race

The following is the Op-Ed “Verbatim Theatre” in response to the Community’s processing of the national tragedies in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. We reflect on Principal Hassan’s email, Saturday’s assembly, Dr. Chaver’s article, the die-in held on Friday, the corresponding ALES meeting, Sunday’s Phillips Church conversation and discussions occurring throughout campus.  In a discussion between seven ‘others’ exploring what’s problematic, we delve into a meta conversation of how we discuss race in America. This discussion took place on Tuesday, December 9th, 2014, in the common room of Main Street Hall. We invite you to read and respond in kind.

Written by Tierra McClain, Mercedes Carbonell, Emily Lemmerman, Danna Shen, Kelvin Green II, Tori Hewitt, Rowan McDonald. 

TIERRA: Black students.

EMILY: Black students, like one of you could have... one of you could be subject to this.

TIERRA: I think it was to point out, again, that it's an Exeter issue.

CARBONELL: Mhm.

EMILY: I mean, what did you find slimy about it? Because it felt slimy in the moment, but I wasn’t really sure why.

CARBONELL: I think I felt uncomfortable with it, not because it, because… I think at Exeter I’m bothered by the fact that we always have to bring it back to ourselves in order to be able to understand something. So, I would like it if we could get to a place where we could believe that something is serious that seems, initially, to have little to do with us.  Nonetheless, in this case, it has a lot to do with us.

TIERRA: Yeah, and I think I felt that same way when I read his email and he decided to plug in Harkness. It just felt very out of place to bring it to something like that.

DANNA: Also, the, just the article, like the example of the person––I just. I don’t know. I didn’t understand when I first read the email. I didn’t understand why that was the example. I was kind of upset by the fact that…

CARBONELL: The example of Lt. Lohr?

DANNA: Yeah, yeah.  It made me upset for a while and then as days passed just very, very disappointed that the example of Lt. Lohr had been chosen. I guess I had been talking to someone about why I felt disappointed. And I think they had a very different response to what I did, but they pointed out that Exeter is an intellectual place that values dialogue.  And that’s something a lot of students value, something that a lot of instructors value, and it’s something we value at the Harkness table. But to some extent, it feels like that email was just an example of how the administration doesn’t connect in that way.  Just because in large part the people in J. Smith operate in a very different world than we do in terms of just having discussions. And it felt like maybe… perhaps… because of that, they almost didn’t understand how to start a dialogue between students and faculty about this.

TIERRA: Can I read the excerpt from the email?

CARBONELL: Absolutely ~

TIERRA: “I was struck by one particular story in The New York Times about Lt. Jerry Lohr, a St. Louis County Police officer who has been walking unarmed into crowds of protesters simply to speak with them and, on an individual level, begin to gain their trust.  Lt. Lohr told the Times reporter that talking “one-on-one” is important bridge-building, adding, “They may not agree with what I’m doing, but now they at least know my name and my face.”

Lt. Lohr’s story is a good example of how powerful dialogue can be.  And we know that well because of our time at the Harkness table, and in the dorms and dining halls, where we are fortunate to have these opportunities for engagement with people from other places and with perspectives different than our own.  Let’s not forget that, or take it for granted, and learn from others as we all try to process what’s happened in Ferguson, and in other parts of the world.”

CARBONELL: The spirit of the idea of dialogue, I have absolutely no trouble with. Because… of course!  That’s been one of the questions.  And I feel like students have been asking to have dialogue and you guys have been having it in your own ways.  Um, there are two things that I’m thinking about: one is the fact that students are not feeling and many faculty are not feeling like those who are in positions of power in the administration are doing what this officer did.  They’re not walking out into our crowd. When you get called into the office… you get called into “the office.” So there’s that… what can feel, I guess, like an hypocrisy. But I think that my initial reaction to it…

EMILY: Because he’s white and presumably in a position of power.

CARBONELL:  I’m thinking of this past fall and how people were getting called into offices and feeling intimidated by that.  So, for instance, if we took his story as an example of what our administration would do, our administrators would be walking out into ~ They would go to meet the students somewhere else. They would go and talk to a faculty member somewhere else. Do you know what I mean? They are the “police.” At least that’s the perception. “The Administration” is the “police.”

EMILY: And they are not doing what Lt. Lohr...

CARBONELL: And they’re not doing what Hassan believes is so great––at least that’s my understanding of the fall term. The second thing I thought of is that I think I’m uncomfortable with the idea, particularly at this moment, on last Wednesday of sort of, I don’t know if it’s honoring…?

TIERRA: It’s commending...

CARBONELL: Commending a white policeman’s actions.

TIERRA: Yes! Thank you!

ROWAN: I think it largely misses the point in that, when we discuss Ferguson we actively try not to discuss Ferguson.  In that, in many discussions I’ve had, I have had to reiterate the fact that this isn’t about Ferguson, this isn’t about Michael Brown—I mean it is—but, it’s as much about Michael Brown as it is about many many other cases. But, it has much more to do with larger issues at play.  For the same reason we wouldn’t look into the individual specifics of the Michael Brown case because it’s irrelevant, this feels like kind of a similar abuse.

TIERRA: I know that when I read the other part of this email, I also felt that he was trying to commend Lt. Lohr for going out of his comfort zone and approaching protesters. It made it seem as if... up until that point there wasn’t a dialogue. And...  it made me think of how many of these protests are being stereotyped as “violent rioting” that isn't "getting anywhere,” and that it took, I guess, this white police officer, who I see painted as a hero, to change that atmosphere.  ...And, that’s not true, at all.

EMILY: Yeah, and “civilized.”  And that’s what rubbed me the wrong way about the assembly. The final speech felt very much the same way that, I mean, I think it’s okay to talk about ways of protest or how we respond to things.  But, to me that assembly felt like it belittled the die-in to some extent. Rather than I think… actually allow the students who actually participated in it to think about, you know, what their own ideals were.

TIERRA: I think it allowed people who did not participate to kind of stand against it …

DANNA: And to justify a reason why they weren’t a part of it…

EMILY: Yeah, and so, I don’t like that.

CARBONELL: There was a line in that final speech, “You can’t just show up to a die-in and expect things to change.”  And that, the tone of that comment, I had a very hard time interpreting. I thought it was dismissive of the die-in.  And it reiterated all of the cynicism,  all the sort of like, “Oh it’s futile, nothing’s going to change.”  And, of course, to actually take that leap to participate in a die-in or any protest, yeah, you may not change the world, but you can change yourself. And I felt that that had gone a little bit unacknowledged.

ROWAN: I thought it was a somewhat shortsighted speech. In terms of… there’s a mindset in protest culture and changing anything that you won’t be around to see the change and that it’s a hundred year stretch of time. This kind of protest does have weight. Maybe not now, maybe in 100 years.

CARBONELL: And there’s also the very real sense of comfort that I heard at ALES that night.  The feeling of comfort that people had and the feeling of sheer solidarity. And someone spoke so eloquently about gravity, the realization that at the end of that four-and-a-half minutes, she could get up.

TIERRA & KELVIN: Tori.

CARBONELL: And Michael Brown couldn’t. And Eric Garner couldn’t. And anybody else who’s ever been in that situation. And to me, that . . .

ROWAN: I felt very much like I didn’t understand the gravity of it until afterwards. Like, I kind of was like, “I’m going to do this thing because it feels right, even though it’s not necessarily what I organized to do. But this is fine I’ll participate in it.” And then, I did, and it was…and I didn’t really understand how to process it—it was very cold. And then afterwards, I looked on Facebook, and I saw a picture in black-and-white with some Instagram filter, and it was just so clear that the image that we constructed was, like, a representational genocide, and it struck me on a very emotional level just seeing the image of what we’d done from a—

Main Street fire alarm begins to blare.

KELVIN: Really? This is the last thing that we need.

ROWAN: ­­ . . . third party perspective.

CARBONELL: Sorry guys, I have to deal with this.

Everybody leaves the building. Kelvin stands outside, shoeless, in the rain. Eventually, everyone makes their way back inside. After we return, Tori Hewitt joins us.

ROWAN: I was talking about Mr. Jordan’s comment about protests, and he was talking about success, but he was talking about a very, very short-sighted success. The success he was talking about is direct change in laws and legislation. And yes, it’s maybe difficult to see an individual protest’s direct effect on an institution. But I was just going on the gravity, and how I began to interpret that, and saw it as being more social for people walking by and those who were there.

CARBONELL: And Tori, I had quoted you in what you said in ALES… about gravity literally and figuratively, about realizing you had a choice of getting up after the four-and-a-half minutes.

KELVIN: I was just going to say… going back to Mr. Jordan and his examples of protests—Market Basket and Occupy Wall Street—the examples didn’t really pertain to the die-in.  People are not doing the die-in for just one case, and so… going back to this idea of “this is not just a one time instance and people are going to get over it”.... The fire was already there. It’s just that Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamer Rice added fuel to it. And so I think he downplayed the feeling, the emotion behind the protest. He made it seem like it’s just about Michael Brown… and didn’t give the die-in the justice it deserved...it meant, when we planned it.

EMILY: Well, it also… it didn’t feel personal. It felt really cold. I think it is appropriate for him to, in the context he was saying it, to assess different protests and be like, “Hey, be informed about protests, these are some other protests…” But then the point where I felt strange about his comment… It felt removed in the same way Mr. Hassan’s email doesn’t talk too much about our engagement on campus. I mean, he started the assembly saying that there had been a lot of engagement, while I didn’t feel as if there had been a lot of engagement or at least enough to where he could say that, so that was troubling to me… That the coldness of that address––

CARBONELL: One of my critiques, and I shared this with you [Kelvin]... Emily, one of my critiques of the panel was the representation… um, it was all straight people, I think, and, um, it was…. and the bookends were white straight men, and there was only one woman, and so just the representation alone was unsettling to me. You know, I didn’t… I wouldn’t have necessarily wanted a white woman there, but I thought it was important to have…. In particular I was bothered by the fact that it was opened by a white straight man and closed by a white straight man.

ROWAN: Yes, I thought there was maybe a lack of perspective in these conversations. As an administration, you would want to model that there are different ways of approaching these situations. And I thought they didn’t focus on the different aspects, I mean, the assembly was long, and they didn’t really have that many speakers. I felt that so much of what they said was not necessary. I could have gone without the political speech at the end by Mr. Jordan… Just because of the immediacy of the situation we are talking about, right? So, the reason we are talking about this at all is because the media’s attention on the issues… and that’s a whole aspect of criticism and analysis that wasn’t brought up in the discussion at all. Also, like, why are we talking about this because of Ferguson? They talked about the emotional side of Ferguson––Dean Salcedo did and Dr. Wade did––and, um, and then they talked about the analytical side, but they didn’t talk about… about how to humanely deal with how this pattern manifested.

TIERRA: Well, I mean… Dr. Wade… gave a big portion of his time going over the history. He was saying in his talk as black people in this country begin to get traction… and start to—what’s the word… Improve? Rise? Rise—there’s a wall that is put up so that, that uprising slope is, you know, stopped. I mean he went back to 1619, to the introduction of African slaves in this country, and how that point... that’s the root of it all.

ROWAN: But what they did was have two history teachers and the Dean of Multicultural Affairs who all are... who all are well-read and practiced in this study. And my point is that it’s not very useful for a student to model because what tools have they offer us? I could go to the library to learn, which we do in our history classes...  but it [the assembly] hasn’t given me new light.

CARBONELL: I felt that when Dr. Wade changed his clothes and put on the Purdue sweatshirt… that was actually a really important moment… because we are all visual as learners and so you could really see. … And I found Dean Salcedo’s speech to be very moving, and I think partly because she spoke about the real people in our lives. And I think one of the things I hear us saying, is… that detachment, that intellectualization is in and of itself part of what is so exhausting. The more we intellectualize, the further away we get. Tori, you’ve said this, but I think we get further and further away from the emotional responses, and the emotional responses are part of what let us know that there is some kind of systemic injustice.

TORI: Also, one thing that I found to be kind of problematic…. I was thankful that they talked about the history of it at the assembly, but only talking about the history makes people think we’re not over past events… when they don’t understand that this is a contemporary problem. Like, you look at statistics, you look at data… racism is not over. It is still systemic; it is still something that affects people on a daily basis. And I think it’s easy for, particularly people of color at Exeter, to pretend that it’s not a problem because we are privileged in other ways that make up for our blackness or brownness. And so, I think he could have also listed more modern statistics, and more ideas… even just things like, “Why Do We Think About African American Hair” as being inferior to, you know, what is traditionally Caucasian hair? Something that simple and that small does perpetuate bad ideas between races, and I think they could have talked about that as a contemporary problem, not just the historical one.

KELVIN: Um, going back to Dean Salcedo’s speech…. I think that one of the big things to learn if you were student, faculty, staff… was when she said, "How do you use your privilege?" Because whether you’re a white or a black person at Exeter, and many of the people there were, how do you use your privilege to bring about change? At the 3 pm Church Session––I don’t know her name––someone went up to speak about a YouTube video she watched, and it was…. Well, one of the main points that I liked was, “Speak Up, Don’t Speak Over,” which is a big thing, because you see this idea of, like, of running towards, like, “I think this is an injustice. Let me run towards it,”  and then you leave the people who are feeling the injustice behind. She even made the comment, “Don’t say, "I can’t breathe," if you’re white say, "They can’t breathe." Because you can breathe just fine.” Um, so, I thought that was just a big thing––how do you use your privilege as a white individual, as an Exonian, as a Dean, as a teacher… to bring about change? Don’t worry about, like, “Oh, I need to run towards this cause…” Just use your privilege. Don’t think this doesn’t apply to you… because you can bring about change. Because, whether you are white, whether you are not experiencing injustice, but you just see it… you just see––

DANNA: Kelvin, something that you just said somewhere in the middle of your comment… you were, I think, talking about the idea of… there being ways we build hierarchy in discussions like this. Oh, you said, “Leaving the people who face the injustice behind.” And I think that’s a little bit what this email does… ‘cause I am a little bit trying to process how I feel about this email through how we are talking about it right now. And I feel like that is actually my biggest problem with the email… is that it feels like pulling out Lt. Lohr as the example leaves behind all of the dialogue, all of the protests, all of the other really important things that people who had experienced injustice were doing in the moment and it makes it… it makes it so that this one individual who has not faced this injustice is the most important narrative in the process. Or at least that’s the message to our community. And that really concerns me.

TORI: And saying things like, “Not All Cops”.... I think that’s a really inappropriate response to something like this, because you know discrimination against cops is not a systemic problem, right? And everyone knows racism in the old age definition of the word… all isms are bad… right? Sexism, racism. Bad. You know, it’s all bad. And it’s about what becomes systemic that’s a problem… that we need to work to fix. And so, if someone says, “White people are the sociological majority,” and whites as a whole are collectively enacting racism within our culture… that doesn’t mean ALL white people. But to say “Not All Whites” or “Not All Men” or “Not All Cops”...that’s what I felt when I read his email. Like, it doesn’t matter “Not All Cops”––it’s a systemic problem, and just because it’s Not All Cops that do these things doesn’t mean that we can’t do something about it, or that we shouldn’t do something about it.

TIERRA: Right.

CARBONELL: And I was thinking about a lens that I always look through… which is asking the questions: “Who speaks? Who listens? Whose voices are legitimized? Whose voices are silenced?” And in this email, the legitimized voice is the voice of the White cop who already has the power. Um, and I kept thinking about… why not honor… I mean you and I were talking about this, Kelvin… why not honor, for instance, every young Black boy who has to navigate this territory everyday, and all the times that every Black boy goes into uncomfortable situations, like a White convenience store. To buy a pack of gum. Without a gun.

ALL: Right, right.

KELVIN: To buy sweet tea and skittles.

CARBONELL: Right. Right...So there is the way in which that… I think someone used the word hero… Lt. Lohr became the hero of the story.

KELVIN: I think... It’s so quick to say the cop is the hero because everywhere you see cops are praised for their heroism in decreasing crime. They are just looked at as the models…. Children of color look up to firemen, policemen... and are just in awe of them. Fathers are going to have to tell their sons the reality...all cops are not going to like you, all cops will not treat you as the person you are, all cops will not––  Like it all goes back to the systemic issue because if there’s a one time instance, no one’s going to "Not All"...because it’s that one time instance. But people are quick, whether it’s feminism, to say, “Not All Men,” whether it’s racism,“Not All––” Like, people are quick to say those things because it kind of justifies how they feel at the time, like, “Oh... maybe he was right, so not all cops...” And, it just goes back to the issue of people thinking "Ferguson" is about the cops who killed, like Rowan said, the Michael Browns, the Eric Garners. But like the bigger picture, it’s an issue, and people run from that and I think target the one case, which is not justifiable…

CARBONELL: It also honors the idea, and, and I don’t know if we want to get into rage and anger and other things, but I am, I think this is the other thing that I’ve been feeling. There’s, there’s been so much discussion on campus about… um… sort of the inappropriateness of anger and the inappropriateness of rage and here is this… this sort of calm, white policeman and––

EMILY: And he CAN be calm. That’s the thing.

CARBONELL: Exactly. He can be calm and I just…. Are you guys okay with me sort of just entering in this idea of anger and rage?

EMILY: We can always cut it out.

[Laughter]

CARBONELL: I just want to read this... It’s from “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” It was from 1981, and it’s written by Audre Lorde, and she begins with the definition of racism: “The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby, the right to dominance, manifest and implied.” And then her next category is women responding to racism, and then she writes—actually I think this was a talk—“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing also. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.”

ROWAN: Today I was discussing Dr. Chaver’s article…. and, in it, she has an emotional moment where she says, “I want to shout” and she says a bunch of expletives. And… I found myself defending her anger, and… and her legitimate right to be angry in the circumstance, and like, it has nothing to do with the one year-old child and the apple picking, and it has absolutely everything to do with this, to do with this system. It’s very easy to pick apart the one case and the manifest example. It’s not that easy to pick apart racism.

TIERRA: I also thought of… of Rev’s meditation, in which he says, “Why not be outraged?” He is outraged—but as a community, we should all be outraged… And I felt his frustration of being tired of having to justify or explain himself as to why he was outraged to…ummm…individuals who weren’t understanding or empathetic of that. But, I mean pairing his moving meditation of why we should be outraged against, again, the email that felt very neutral and just very glossing over the severity of the moment. It just—they’re both, like, almost on two different spectrums.

ROWAN: The Assembly, too, was with the email. On that spectrum.

EMILY: Wait, and doesn’t he reference Rev. in the email. He says, “in light of Reverend Thompson,” I think.

CARBONELL: [reading from the email] “Hope you were in church this morning to hear Reverend Thompson’s…”

EMILY: Yeah! “To hear Reverend Thompson’s,” and [the email] was very, I don’t know… I also noticed that, and it felt like irony.

DANNA: I, um, I don’t know how… I don’t know if I am going to say this the right way or how I’m going to say this.

KELVIN: You can always cut it out.

[Laughter]

DANNA: I, I, I one hundred percent agree with this idea that like, the way people dismiss anger, and stuff like that, I think it’s, I think it’s, like, horrible. I think it is one of the most counter-productive ways of approaching these conversations, but at the same time––a lot of times––I find myself in a situation. Like, I do think partly because I’m not black, but also not white, that I feel like I’m sometimes in the situation where I shouldn’t be angry, or I need to be a buffer. Like I need to be a buffer in that situation, and even though I feel the anger, sometimes I feel as though...um...in those discussions, the place where I can be the most helpful or perhaps, um...the, the best able to contribute, is not by being angry, even though I am, and I guess, I, I just wonder...I guess I’m still trying to figure out how to work that balance and sometimes, I don’t want to and, and sometimes I do, like, rationally think it’s the best thing that I should be doing, and I guess, I’m trying to understand how to do it.

EMILY: I wish we talked about that because that’s such a personal...thing. Like I didn’t feel like that was talked about, and I also want to talk about, I had a conversation with someone who directly disagreed with me on this, but I felt like it wasn’t emotional, like the response, kind of wasn’t emotional enough...um…

TIERRA: His email.

EMILY: His email. The Assembly was relatively on the cold side and not on the you know, emotional. Let’s talk about how we act with allies, as bystanders, as whatever. And like, for me, the way I conceptualize what Danna’s talking about is that it’s my privilege to not be as angry as people who cannot be anything but angry. And like, I don’t mean to say that in a way that paints people who are angry in an irrational way. I want to do it in a way that paints people who are irrationally angry in, like, a very human way… like, they are angry for a reason… listen to them! They are reasonable, and…

CARBONELL: And, systematic injustice is irrational. So, an irrational response to an irrational system, in some ways, is…

KELVIN: Is the right answer.

CARBONELL: It makes sense to me. I remember when Harvey Milk was shot and killed in San Francisco, and the verdict came out that he had not… I dunno if you guys know about this, but he was the first openly gay elected official… and he, and the mayor, were both shot and killed, and when it happened, it was calm and people were standing on the street corners saying, “Where is your anger? Where is your anger?” And then, the night that the system—that the justice system—did not support them, and let Dan White off, the city erupted. You know, I do think it’s because there’s an irrationality that people are responding to… with rage.

KELVIN: It goes back to what Dean Salcedo said about being colorblind. "If you don’t see my race, you don’t see me."...Like, connecting it to Dr. Chaver’s article with what she said… I feel like when people respond “Oh, she shouldn’t have, like, said that.”, “That’s not professional,” stuff like that—it’s a human thing to have a natural emotional response, and emotional responses are usually good indicators of maybe action to take after that. So, to say that she can’t express her emotions is to say, like, that she can’t be human, and I think, like you [Rowan] said, picking apart, “Oh, you shouldn’t have said, “Eff your children.”” Like that’s really––that’s not the point of her article. And I found out about this from a faculty, but, she’s disappointed about how wrongly interpreted her article was, which is sad that you can’t see the grief that she’s writing the paper on, which is… a great indicator of how far we need to go as like a people.

TIERRA: Also, now it’s, it’s retitled.

EMILY: It’s retitled? What is it called?

TIERRA: An Elegy for Michael Brown.

TORI: I want... I’m thinking of that poem by Audre Lorde…

CARBONELL: [reading the poem]  She says, “I have not been able to touch the destruction / within me. But unless I learn to use / the difference between poetry and rhetoric / my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold / or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire / and one day I will take my teenaged plug / and connect it to the nearest socket / raping an 85 year old white woman / who is somebody’s mother / and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed / a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time / ‘Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.’" That's it... Rhetoric or poetry. Okay, so here's a question: If Dr. Chavers had written a poem...

KELVIN:  Hmm, no one would’ve said anything. [Laughter]

CARBONELL: If she had written a poem would we be reacting differently? And I also guess I wonder if––wow, this is a loaded question––if our principal were not a white man, a white straight man...Would we expect something...

TIERRA: More?

CARBONELL: Yes. More.

TORI: And we would.CARBONELL: We would, and I think we would get more.

TORI: We would get more, and we would expect more, and that is inherently something... That is bad. That. I mean I understand not being able to show empathy for people, but.... He's Principal of our school. He should be able to acknowledge the pain...the pain that I have felt for a really long time and like it has. It has only recently been manifested. Like, I leave Stu-Cothinking I'm angry about people in Stu-Co… And I just realize that I'm just angry. I'm mad.

[Laughter of Solidarity]

TIERRA: I'm mad! Yeah.

TORI: But yeah. Later, I appreciated, though, that at the assembly he did acknowledge the pain…. He said specifically, he used the phrase “pain on this campus,” but I think that should have been done earlier.

TIERRA: I remember someone… I forget if this is faculty or student, but saying that after giving his anecdote about visiting grand central station and he said realizing the seriousness of it all...  They thought that at that point he would go back on his email...

KELVIN: It was Carbs....

CARBONELL: I said that.

TIERRA: Oh, that was you!

CARBONELL: I actually thought he was going to go back and––

TIERRA: Dismiss his email!

CARBONELL: I did, I thought he was going to go back and reflect on his email. I hoped he would. That was a moment where really I thought, "Here we go...." And that something deeply human had come as opposed to...this...you know...

TIERRA: Something cold.

KELVIN: And then he ran away from it by saying, "And then I noticed that I missed my train."

[Laughter]

EMILY: Oh really? He said that?

KELVIN: Yeah. He said something like, "I couldn't make it to my subway."

EMILY: Can we just talk about cold versus emotion for one minute… Because I was talking about it afterwards and feeling like the response was very cold, like.... I'm not being articulate enough. [Laughter]….It felt very scientific when like this is...  not a science issue. It’s emotional...

TIERRA: Yeah, trying to intellectualize it...

EMILY: Yes, trying to intellectualize it when it is a… very emotional issue. Which is why I felt uncomfortable, particularly with the first and last speeches. And then, someone who walked into the room, who hadn't heard me say any of it, said they thought the last part was the best, because it provided the most “concrete evidence.”

[Laughter]

TORI: Oh, God.

EMILY: Like, the New Jim Crow stuff.

KELVIN: Oh okay, that’s different! That was good.

EMILY: Yeah, the New Jim Crow content was good…but I don’t really know how to reconcile…well, maybe on some level there is a need for... [information]. Everyone should be informed, but that doesn’t mean everyone is informed. And I don’t know how to reconcile that. For this person, that was a very valuable part of it that made them have an emotional response... to say, “Wow, this is a huge issue.” So, I don’t…

ROWAN: I-I… I think that conversely, the coldness of their responses in the context of these events… results in dehumanization.

CARBONELL: Yes.

TIERRA: Hmm.

ROWAN: It’s an easy way to dehumanize people.

CARBONELL: And there are––A faculty of color did say to me, “Where is the white rage?” in all of this. And I think that is a legitimate request. And I think that’s maybe part of what we’re sensing. In some ways, I did want to hear . . . There are times when I don’t necessarily want someone to calm me down… I need someone to meet me in the emotional space where I am. Or where we are. Or where you all are...

DANNA: Can I say one thing really quickly? Just because I want to sort of clarify for the sake of the conversation, and for the sake of the op-ed, about how it’s not individual and how it is systematic.... I just want to make sure that we aren’t falling into that trap,  too… in the sense that we talked specifically about Principal Hassan, but I do think that in a lot of ways, it’s not just about Principal Hassan…. It is the entire administration, and I want that to be––

EMILY: Or it’s all administrations, ever.

CARBONELL: Well, it’s the legacy of the institution, right? It’s the history. And what role does the administration have to play in a more active and engaged way to counter a history that is deeply patriarchal, deeply white, deeply heterosexist, and deeply elite.

KELVIN: And it just seemed to me personally that there were, you know... Exeter takes things and makes them more complex? It felt like they took the anger of the protest and made it so that Exonians could understand it and put it in a, you know, more professional… Assembly required...  speech...

CHORUS: As if anger needs a translation . . .

(Our hope is that this can be the beginning of a wider and longer conversation with others. Anger may beg for translation and so the work before us is how we can learn to enter into that dialectic. For those who feel the assault of anger, let’s ask ourselves, “Where might this anger be coming from?” Ultimately, we want to bring all of this back to HOW we can learn to talk about Race and Systematic Injustice and issues of Power.)