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Bush cronies turning campuses
dissent-free
By
Irene Monroe
The repressiveness of the Bush Administration
is all over American college campuses. And it’s not only in
the demand to reinstall U.S. military recruitment with the
so-called Solomon Amendment, which requires military recruitment
be allowed or schools risk losing federal funds. It’s also in
Republican-funded college and university administrations that
employ any means necessary – intimidation and/or physical
force – to have a dissent-free campus.
Seven students at Hampton University in
Virginia, one of the nation’s historically black colleges,
faced expulsion on Dec. 2 for a crime these days viewed as
either treason or sedition against the government.
Leafleting what the university depicts as
“unauthorized” literature about the Bush Administration’s
racist polices regarding homophobia, AIDS, Hurricane Katrina,
genocide in Sudan, and the Iraq war as part of a November
protest initiated by The
World Can’t Wait – Drive Out Bush Regime, the “Hampton
Seven” were issued summonses for a hearing with no time to
contact either their parents or their lawyers.
For weeks leading up to the protest that
involved over 200 universities and colleges nationwide, the
Hampton Seven were followed by campus police, targeted by video
surveillance, and forced to turn over their IDs.
But the harassment didn’t just center on
the Hampton Seven.
“The HU police booked several people just
because they were wearing stickers and other paraphernalia
because they looked suspicious. The police used hand-help
camcorders to record the faces of the activists without
permission. They attempted to intimidate the student onlookers
by their random targeting,” wrote two of the Hampton Seven –
John Robinson, and Brandon King, both senior sociology majors
– in “Corporate
Plantation: Political Repression and the Hampton Model.”
Once apprehended, hundreds of phone calls and
thousands of signatures from around the country defending the
students – including from such notables as Howard Zinn, Cindy
Sheehan, Gore Vidal, Bill T. Jones and Alice Walker – reached
the dean’s office. Attempting to prevent the story from
leaking out, campus police shut down all interviews being filmed
by the local media.
Hampton’s code of conduct reportedly allows
peaceful, non-violent protest, but with one caveat –
administration approval.
“Therein lies the problem. If they are
going to practice their freedom of speech, they have to have
permission,“ Hampton student Aaron Williams told a local
reporter.
However, many students at Hampton say it’s
not that the flyers were “unauthorized” – because many of
them were. The problem was the anti-Bush content in the flyers.
“I just want people to know that this is
not solely about us being exonerated. Even if they let us off
the hook, conditions on campus will be even worse. . . . There
is a lot of connection here, it is more severe and ridiculous at
our campus, but repression is going on across the U.S.,“ John
Robinson told Sunsara Taylor, co-initiator of The
World Can’t Wait.
Behind the Hampton Seven’s protest is a
window into a more insidious problem that is unrelenting,
pervasive and has metastasized into a community of
African-American students -- Bush’s Republicanism and the way
it cultivates a political docility and elitist assimilationist
indoctrination.
Headed by an African American, Dr. William R.
Harvey is president of Hampton University. He is also a Bush
appointee to the Federal National Mortgage Association and a
benefactor to Bush-Cheney coffers. Hampton’s June 2005
commencement speaker, whom Harvey selected, was his crony
Alphonso Jackson, Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development. Jackson has deliberately cut back access for poor
African Americans to subsidized Section 8 Housing and has
unabashedly boasted to The Houston Chronicle that New
Orleans should not allow most of its displaced denizens back
because they were parasitic to the economy, and the future of
New Orleans in order for it to survive must shift from being
predominately black to predominately white.
With just days removed from World AIDS Day
– with more reports of how the pandemic continues to grow and
ravage communities of African descent - students had to fight
vigorously for an AIDS Awareness group on campus. Why? Agreeing
along with Bush’s policy of abstinence only, “President
Harvey responded that we probably did not need one because
everyone knows about AIDS,” Johnson wrote. The city of
Hampton, Va., however, is one of the top 10 AIDS-infected areas
in the country, and black college campuses on the whole have a
disproportionate number of students with HIV/AIDS.
And homophobia contributes to the problem on
campus. However, homophobia on Hampton’s campus is so virulent
that I couldn’t find any current students to talk openly about
homophobia or HIV/AIDS without fear of reprisal.
But an alumnus of the class of 1976, Dr. Thea
James, an emergency Medicine physician at Boston Medical Center
and assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at the Boston
University School of Medicine, talked about her days at Hampton.
“It was very repressive and run like a police state, and I and
everyone else had to toe the line. I wasn’t out then because I
feared being thrown out of the pre-med program. Today I imagine
the same thing. I never got involved with campus political
activism because there wasn’t any. I am proud of these recent
Hampton students.”
As it turned out, Hampton University did not
expel the Hampton Seven. But the University released a statement
downplaying the issue: “The matter was simply an issue of
compliance with University polices and procedures. The
University certainly permits peaceful protest; however all
polices and procedures must be adhered to by students as stated
in the Hampton University official Student Handbook.”
And therein lies the problem.
posted 9 December 2005* * *
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A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 27 December 2011
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