Race and 'Respectability'
When Aubrey J. Walker ’15 first heard that an unarmed black youth about to begin college had been shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., he was finishing up an internship in policy research and preparing to head back to Harvard to complete his degree in Human Evolutionary Biology.
“I had kind of bought into this narrative that if I could achieve this level of respectability, that if I studied and worked hard enough my life would be worth something,” he remembers thinking.
This summer, the now-infamous shooting of Michael Brown, and the subsequent brutal crackdown on protests in Ferguson launched a nationwide trial of racialized character, pitting a vision of a friendly, college-bound teenager against a vision of a threatening convenience store robber.
Walker sat down with fellow Harvard seniors Temitope Agabalogun, Amanda D. Bradley, and Fadhal A. Moore in the Eliot House dining hall last Friday to discuss why neither of these narratives should matter.
“Why should it be ‘Oh, he was going to college in a few days,’ versus ‘Oh, he was going to rob a store?’” asked Moore. “Either way, it doesn’t matter—extrajudicial killings are not allowed in this country.”
The four seniors, who had all served as leaders of the black Harvard community in organizations like the Association of Black Harvard Women, the Black Men’s Forum, and the Freshman Black Table, began discussing these issues in an e-mail thread over the summer . The discussion launched plans for a mass incarceration policy group at the Harvard Institute of Politics, a Tumblr blog about the issue, and a solidarity event on Harvard’s campus (Black Men’s Forum current president, Rodriguez A. Roberts ’15, also played a large part in these efforts). The event, which took place on Widener Library’s steps last Sunday, brought nearly 200 black Harvard students dressed in school paraphernalia to pose with their hands up in a group photograph.
The students’ clothing, the organizers explained, was intended to critique the idea that black students should have to use their Harvard status—or other symbols of success and respectability—to prove their right to live.
“I’ve heard of [black students] flashing their Harvard IDs when they get pulled over on the road—they keep it under their licenses,” said Moore. “There’s always a need, given our perceptions of the way authorities see us, to change the way we interact with them.”
Bradley, who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, remembers how differently police officers treated her from the other black youths in her neighborhood.
“I went to a private Catholic school, so I wore a uniform, and often I’d be walking home from school and the police would basically be harassing kids on my street,” she recalls. “I’d walk up speaking the King’s English and they’d be very nice to me—they’d speak to me as a human being.”
Even on Harvard’s campus, black students have had to “prove” their right to be present in certain spaces. In 2007, when two black student groups held a barbeque on the Quad lawn, a passerby called the police, who asked attendees to show identification. In 2009, the arrest of Harvard African American studies professor Henry Louis Gates for “breaking” into his own apartment made national news.
These incidents and others were addressed by last year’s “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign, which criticized an institutional culture that can make black students feel marginalized or alienated.
But while that campaign targeted conceptions of what it means to belong at Harvard, Agabalogun, Bradley, Moore, and Walker, are now hoping to move the discussion toward the legitimacy that should be based on natural rights alone.
“Now it’s ‘I Too Am Human,’” said Moore.
The organizers also hope to effect change in the national discussion of incidents like the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. “In America, we typically try to walk around these problems without addressing race, without addressing black people as victims,” explained Agabalogun.
In addition to the IOP policy group, the organizers discussed plans to launch discussions with advocacy groups at other universities, with the goal of encouraging students across the nation to contact their state senators and representatives.
“What’s seductive about respectability politics is the idea of free will and individual agency,” explained Walker. “But we’re battling entire structures. We need to organize among our groups and communities, look at statewide and nationwide policy.”
For Agabalogun, Bradley, Moore, and Walker, countering the notion that success can be equated with the right to live is both essential and deeply personal.
“My brother is a high-school dropout,” said Bradley. “If he got shot, would we talk about his death differently?"