An open letter to Brad Salmen:
You squander your precious First Amendment rights by using The Mac Weekly to publish things you could say in a fascist dictatorship. As a sort of ombudsman to the students of color among the Weekly’s readership, I thought it necessary to object to your editorial reign of terror. The things you’ve said are cruel, and the way you said them does not evidence bravery, but misogyny and ignorance. I hope Macalester continues to educate people responsibly; I hope we’re not afraid, and I hope that we can find it in ourselves to speak out of love and not hate. Therefore, I want to present to this campus “Four Things You Are Wrong About So Hardcore That I Feel Like Fucking Langston Hughes Singing The Old Negro Spirituals”:
Sex and gender are not the same thing. Plenty of Macalester professors, and expensive textbooks, will tell you that. And furthermore, don’t you ever try to make an argument about gender based on discrediting the subjective testimony of survivors of rape. People deserve a better understanding of what makes us human than you think.
There is absolutely no possibility that Mumia Abu-Jamal is cold-blooded. He is a human being, a Muslim, and a disfranchised American citizen. By drawing attention to the chaos theory style probability that Mumia did what a racist judge said he did, you reveal an unconscionable disrespect for your country’s principles, a tragic ignorance of the forces that brought about Mumia Abu-Jamal’s conviction (see COINTELPRO), and a pathetic disregard for human life-again.
You are racist.
The centuries-long traffic in cotton, indigo, sugarcane, spices, tobacco, diamonds, gold, fossil fuels, drugs, animals, ideology, and human beings, especially women, as luxury objects for the wealthy are what have made the Third World poor and the first world rich and the whole world imbalanced. And don’t talk about air pollution starting when man discovered fire-air pollution got worse when men discovered big phallic smokestacks. If the first world is now using technology to repay the Third for a history of genocide, it sure could hurry the hell up. Whose idea of reparations is this-using some technologies to sell people food they’d be able to grow if it wasn’t patented, while using others to blow up warehouses with giant Red Crosses on them and bombard people who are fasting, while denying still others that would alleviate diseases like AIDS for less than it costs to pay the lawyers?
To argue that people around here are too tolerant, too liberal, too politically correct, is to argue that we are not sexist, racist, homophobic, exploitative, and aggressive enough. Mac students hear the vitriol you send to the Weekly every day in their classes; if anything, we don’t need it burned into our eyes in the paper. Everyone at this expensive college is privileged, and every apparatus of the college enables us to maintain our privileges at the expense of people who can’t afford to be here. From the liberal curriculum to the single-sex residential policy to the beer garden at Springfest to the spectacular invisibility of people of color to people like you who mock STARSA for reminding you women are being raped … If this place didn’t privilege conservatism, people like you wouldn’t be able to publish editorials that amount to psychic violence against certain other people, and certain other people wouldn’t be victims of hate crimes. Do you think this $30,000-a-year private liberal arts college in Minnesota with a $500 million endowment that employs sweatshop labor, actively recruits wealthy students and men, and holds stock in multinational corporations is part of some “socialist” conspiracy? Read a book.
Basically, people here contradict you because they live on this planet, and have been so consistently wronged by the ideologies you want to “expose” us to that it is actually painful to hear them valorized over and over again. We have better things to do, like learn how to be free. See, no one needs you to pass judgment, but they do need someone to question that judgment, because otherwise they’d be shot, stabbed, poisoned, deliberately infected with disease, blown up, burned at the stake, deported, enslaved, beaten, raped, robbed, sterilized, drowned, lynched, locked up, tortured, brainwashed, or forgotten. None of us is guilty, we’re just responsible. And like sex and gender, responsibility and guilt are not the same thing. So thanks for nothing, stop being so irresponsible, and please don’t abuse the rights your foremothers fought and died for.
Love,
andré
