Harmful Speech

On Wednesday afternoon, several students discovered graffiti in a SIPA bathroom that made startling and hateful proclamations about Muslims and Africans. The find came just days after police reportedly used excessive force and racial slurs against an Asian American student carrying an open container on 114th Street. It may bring us peace of mind to write these off as isolated occurrences, but to do so would ignore the sad and storied history of bias incidents at Columbia over the past several years. Occasional but deeply disturbing, these episodes serve as reminders that the waters of tolerance at Columbia are still tainted. While blame for such failures of civility does not rest with any one party, it is incumbent on us all to discuss them candidly and to further the causes of mutual respect and understanding around Columbia’s campus.

If one thing became clear from the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia, it was that hateful speech and acts can galvanize the attentions of a campus and a nation. The scale of these two recent bias incidents may pale in comparison, but no act of hatred is minor, and Columbia’s community ought to take special notice of what occurs in its own arena. It is imperative, then, that the University and student body condemn such acts and encourage thoughtful dialogue around them, even when such discussion does not immediately yield practical solutions.

Sadly, when they do occur, bias incidents seem to elicit little more than a yawn from a great many in the Columbia community. When homophobic graffiti was scrawled on the walls of EC and Ruggles last year, for example, some students voiced outrage, but just as many seemed to greet the incidents and their fallout with the indifference and cynicism characteristic of Columbians. Stop Hate On Columbia’s Campus drew flippant criticism when it made waves in spring of 2006, but these two incidents suggest that the organization’s ends deserve our continued consideration, however imperfect and incomplete its means may have been.

It is oft-repeated—but still worthy of repetition—that acts of hate have a poisonous effect on an entire community, not just the individual group that is targeted. As a University committed to free speech and tolerance, Columbia has an obligation to engender dialogue when bias incidents occur and ought to publicly condemn such hateful acts—whether or not a world leader is involved. Likewise, as it ponders the implications of racism, injustice, and oppression halfway around the globe, Columbia’s student body need only look to its own back yard to see hatred playing out in small but still insidious ways.