Dancing Around Lowell Courtyard

It had been a long week, and Halloween weekend or no, I was tired. But when my blockmates ran back from our dining hall to announce that a fight had broken out in the party hosted by the Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers (HSBSE), I leapt off of my bed in jeans and a sweatshirt to investigate. Seconds after we poked our heads out of our entryway into Lowell courtyard, a police officer was marching towards us. “You kids live in the dorm?” and when we nodded our assent, “You better get inside so that you don’t get mixed up in all this.”

Later that night, we hesitantly tiptoed out to IHOP, walking nervously between the rows of police cars, trying not to draw attention to ourselves as young black females, most of us dressed for a party. We spent the rest of the night discussing how unfortunate the incident was, hoping it wouldn’t reflect on HSBSE, and lamenting that the organization probably wouldn’t be allowed to hold the party again in Lowell, if they were allowed to hold one at all.

In the days that followed, friends outside of the black community asked me if I knew anything about the Lowell “riot.” Rumors flew that five people had been hospitalized, and that chairs and windows had been broken in the ensuing chaos. Everyone wanted to know what so many police cars had been doing blocking off the street, but no one seemed to think it was racially motivated. Several people did get a good laugh from looking up the lyrics of the hip-hop song that had supposedly started the fight (“Knuck If You Buck,” by Crime Mob). One of my blockmates even reported that her Spanish class had excitedly discussed the fight at “the black students’ party.”

I’ve heard so many condemnations of the fight and explanations for the police response that night, all of them valid, all of them placing the blame somewhere different. I am far more intrigued, however, by the different responses of my schoolmates in the days that followed.

As a black student, I know that what I say about race will be understood by many to carry a particular bias on this issue. But the truth is that this issue does concern race: not because of the large police presence at a party hosted by a black student group, and not because a black student is talking about it. It is a racial issue because of who threw the party and because of which students knew the group existed before this incident; because of the music played, and because of who attended the party, because I had to question whether I would be stopped in my own courtyard, and because some of my friends felt the need to emphatically justify the police reaction to me. While the incident itself may not have been racially motivated, there are undercurrents of race in the discussion, and the more we dance around them, the more we inhibit our ability to have frank conversations as one student community.

In ignoring these issues, we demonstrate a—perhaps sometimes well-meant—cultural insensitivity. That many students refuse to openly acknowledge potentially racial aspects to this discussion, and yet touch fleetingly on race when they poke fun at the culture of the party, highlights a subtle and unsettling tension. While none of us can say with certainty whether the police reaction was racist or whether Crime Mob’s song was one cause of the fighting, obsessive political correctness creates an atmosphere in which it is uncomfortable to directly engage racial questions, especially as they relate to our student community or our personal attitudes. We have been given an opportunity to break this cycle of silence and circumspection. Perhaps now is the time to have a real, frank discussion.



Weslie M. W. Turner ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Lowell House.