Hate crimes at SDSU
I kept telling myself, when I was at Smith, that it wasn’t really as idyllic for queers and feminists as everyone said it was. Yes, you could walk around Smith at night - hell, around downtown Northampton at night - and feel safe. Yes, there was a huge pride event every year at school and in town, and the campus had a vibrant queer community. But was that really as rare as everyone said it was? Yeah, it’s a “bubble,” but wasn’t that just the higher education bubble in general?
Obviously not, as the last couple of weeks have shown. On Monday, there was an anti-hate speech rally on campus here in San Diego, with tons of people attending - including the President of the university. That night, a woman was attacked on campus and called a faggot lover, and from what I’ve heard campus police have been slow to respond. Wednesday and Thursday, the hate magazine was back on campus distributing (we protested) their newest issue, specifically targeting the gay community at SDSU. Hardly anyone on campus knows about the attack on Monday, and with campus going to break this week it’s likely very few will ever hear about it. Administrators at Smith may have been pretty inept at dealing with hate on campus, but at least students were organized and adamant about not letting it go by unnoticed. Maybe it’s California, or maybe it’s just SDSU, but there’s this depressing apathy about hate speech and hate crimes by an overwhelming majority of campus… so while the Cross-Cultural center and the LGBT student union and the Women’s Resource Center and a handful of departments may actually, you know, care, there’s not much being done about things outside of that little sphere of liberalism sanity humanity.
There’s an article in the Gay and Lesbian Times and there have been two reports on local news stations. For my part, I’m emailing the Chief of Police, John Browning, who was at the rally on Monday and said he should be held personally responsible for responding to events of hate or violence on campus. There’ve been two since the rally on Monday, and from what I know the response has been lackluster at best, non-existent at worst.
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
I never went to Smith, but I am familiar with Noho and I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Between the political and financial climate, surely it was only a matter of time before some asshats decided that the best way of taking out their angst about life would be to attack the most visibly ‘different’ part of the community.
People like that will always find the easiest outlet for their anger, if Noho had a lot of black people it would be a sudden splurge of nooses, Latinos, I dunno, go home signs? The violence is just part and parcel of it.
Still, it’s damned depressing to see that the administration isn’t doing anything about it, never mind the rest of the student body.
Thanks, Orodemniades - I’m not sure if I made it clear in the post (I’ll go back and read), but this actually happened in San Diego, at my current school. I was mentioning Northampton just to highlight the differences in my experience with being a woman/queer and feeling safe.
Thanks for posting this. The school I went to was a good place for gay and lesbian kids to figure things out. It’s a shame to see that isn’t the case everywhere
Ah, okay. It’s still damned depressing, though. And I have to say that revisiting Noho after some 12 years, I was pretty shocked by the climate of the town. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the same town, and yet…or maybe I’m just transferring how my own home town, not far away from Noho, changed from being quite similar in spirit (albeit w/out the student population) to this really conservative place that I barely recognized.
Of course, I’d been living abroad, and gays and lesbians are still pretty…let’s just say that evidence of their existence is not immediately forthcoming. It was very odd.