Reaction Time: Racism, Distractions, and Destruction
This weekend, my university went viral — but what happened to Rini Sampath is about more than one university.
By Ariana Aboulafia
This weekend, my university went viral for all the wrong reasons.
This weekend, USC student body president Rini Sampath walked past a fraternity house on a Saturday night, thinking it would be just like any other Saturday night that she and so many other USC seniors have experienced on this campus.
But, this weekend was not like any other weekend for Sampath. This weekend, Rini Sampath experienced violence and racism firsthand, when a fraternity member threw a drink at her, and screamed at her through his window “You Indian piece of shit!” Because of the color of her skin, Rini Sampath came face to face this weekend with a biting example of the social issues that she fights in office on a daily basis. Because of the color of our student body president’s skin, USC went viral this weekend.
It would be easy to make this an article about Greek life. It would be easy for me, as a journalist, to connect this incident to the boys gleefully singing about lynching and using the n-word at a fraternity event at the University of Oklahoma or the fact that the University of Alabama apparently still resists integrating their sororities. “Look!” I could cry, “This is not an isolated incident! This is institutionalized racism!” Greek life, and members of Greek life, seem to be the obvious target in this instance; it is easy to talk about racism in the Greek system, or sexism, or homophobia — in fact, a member of the very same fraternity who threw a drink and hateful words at Rini Sampath had thrown a student out of a tailgate party earlier that day, calling him a “fag” as justification. It’s too easy to say that Greek life encourages, or institutionalizes, or houses racists and misogynists and homophobes deep behind the literal and metaphorical facades of their mansion-style houses. Greek life, here, is not the target. Racism, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia may be disproportionately present in the Greek system — anyone who denies this even as a possibility is merely closing his eyes against an oncoming wave, a wave that will eventually hit him so hard that he will not know where to turn. I have pity for this person, but I do not have time for him.
Today I do not have the time or the heart to talk about Greek life. Today, I choose to look deeper.
Yesterday, I interviewed USC student body president Rini Sampath. She told me about the emotional trauma that she has suffered as a result of the event, saying that the incident at first made her question her identity, before she realized that in hurling a drink and an epithet at her feet, one of her fellow students also threw something else at her: the opportunity to fight racism, not in the Greek system, and not even at USC, but in the United States in general. Last week, my coworker enlightened me and taught me about the idea of post-racial America — the thought that some people have that, because we as Americans have elected a black man as President that we have also eradicated racism.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine casting your hand, your vote and with it annihilating hate, changing hearts and minds and erasing every racist act from the blows thrown on the backs and faces of young people of color by police to the words, the n-words and other words thrown out of the throats of schoolboys who, we all assume, are just too young to know better? Imagine having this type of power, the power to eliminate racism, simply through the power of our most virtuous votes — this power, it seems, would even impress our founding fathers, if of course it were real.
But it’s not.
The day that I voted for Barack Obama for president, I would be shocked if at least one person in this country, somewhere, was not called an n-word, or an Indian or Pakistani or Chinese or Japanese piece of shit.
The day I voted for Rini Sampath for president of the University of Southern California, I stayed off of the iPhone application Yik Yak, which allows students to post anonymous comments on their college campuses, because I did not want to see the things that I knew people were going to say.
Votes are important. Politics, too, are important — I would not have wasted four years of my life on a political science degree if I did not believe that. But, what happens when the life of a politician becomes about more than politics?
What happens when a politician is degraded down into just a person is that she is able to witness how people view her when her personality, her position, her smile and laugh and network of friends and let’s not forget her power become, for the moment invisible. She is able to see that, to some, without all of those things, she is nothing but a dark-skinned body walking through a darker night. To some, she is nothing but a dartboard used for Solo-cup target practice.
To some, she is nothing but an Indian piece of shit.
“The first thing that [these people] see is the color of our skin, or our sexual orientation, or our physical ability, or our gender identity, and that sickens me. We need to take care of it,” Sampath said to me.
But, before we can take care of it, we must acknowledge it. There are people who want to pretend like this never happened. There are people who have accused Rini Sampath of lying, of using her position as a student body president who is also a woman of color to insert race into a conversation, into a campus, where we all so desperately want to believe that we are colorblind.
Post-racial, indeed.
When I mentioned to Sampath that people had accused her of making the entire incident up, she chuckled and reiterated a piece of her now-viral Facebook post. “What would there be to win by doing that?” she wrote. Speaking out about what happened, clawing through the shouts of people who blame it on fraternities, who blame it on the University, who blame it on Sampath herself for speaking out and “pulling the race card”, shows exactly what there is to win here.
And Sampath is the one who said it best.
A sense of respect. A sense of humanity. A sense of love and compassion for others regardless of [what] they look like.
Each time that we see the smallest expression of hate, of racism or sexism or homophobia, and we do not shut it down, we are part of the problem. Each time we point to our black president or our Indian president as a shining beacon of hope, of proof that we have somehow finally done the right thing and overcome our socially conditioned transgressions, we are making it worse. Each time we read about an expression of racism and call it an isolated incident — something that happens in the American south, sure, but not in Los Angeles, something that happens in fraternities, of course, but not other organizations, something that happens at USC or the University of Oklahoma but nowhere else — each time that we do not absorb these incidents and accept them as a byproduct of our society at large, we are creating distractions.
“Attacking fraternities,” she said “is a distraction.” Attacking and punishing an individual and only an individual construes him as someone who acted alone, of his own free will.
Which he was, but also was not.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that people exist almost completely as results of their social conditioning, or “enframing”. In this sense, this fraternity member did not — and truly none of us, ever really do — act of his own accord. He was socially conditioned, as we all are, socially numbed to the micro and macro racial aggressions each day as he read about them or witnessed them or even participated in them because no one ever stopped, rang the alarm, and told him that none of this was acceptable. Incidents like this, incidents like these do not come out of nowhere. No one wakes up one morning a racist, or even more simply someone who uses racial epithets. We must be taught, conditioned, “enframed” to believe that this is how society works.
And, of course, we are.
If we weren’t, then how could we watch a cell-phone video of Los Angeles Police officers shooting a homeless man without crying? How could watch news of the Charleston shootings without completely falling apart?
How could we defend the flight of the Confederate flag, chalking it up to free speech or free expression or important history?
This is not history. None of this is history. This is happening right now, and if you think it isn’t happening on your college campus because you don’t go to USC, or that it doesn’t happen in your organization because you’re not involved in Greek life, or that it won’t happen to you because you live in a city or your friends are all Democrats or any other number of reasons, you are sorely mistaken. Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the charming excuse du jour.
This weekend, my university went viral. I’m not proud of that.
But, in this moment, I can’t say I’m necessarily proud of the country I live in, either.
“Reaction Time” is a column dedicated to common sense reactions to everyday craziness.
Email columnist Ariana Aboulafia here, or follow her on Twitter here.
