Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

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BLACKOUT: Bull Connor’s Out
Safia Albaiti

Last weekend was Black-Out Weekend, a three-day get-together for the ALANA community at UMass, with cookouts, parties and a little soccer. A get-together for a minority community was dimmed by the shadow of an ugly monster barely able to resist rearing its head at the students congregating at The Cage Friday and Saturday night.

On Friday night, I was walking back to my dorm in Northeast from the Berkshire dining commons, with a couple of friends, when we passed by the Curry Hicks Cage, where people were queuing up for tickets to get inside, where the first Black-Out party was being held. A few feet away, three policemen were standing, eyeing the crowd, one casually holding a black dog by a leash. My heart turned cold just looking at that dog, facing that crowd, with only a leash keeping it from potentially lunging at an unsuspecting student. The crowd was happily chattering away, maybe a little impatient at the length of the lines, but no voices were raised; I realized that this is a community which knows it is not wanted and cannot cross the line. We were not born at that time, but, lest we forget, this is not the first time dogs have been brandished at African-Americans. My friend wryly commented that she was just waiting for the fire hoses to come out. But this is not Birmingham, Alabama 1963. This is UMass Amherst, a supposedly diverse school that not only fails to protect its minority communities, but, at any moment, is ready to unleash a dog in the midst of a crowd of them, if things get a little out of hand. I heard later that the party went very smoothly, but consider this: why would you need a dog, under any circumstances, to keep order anyway? Dogs should be used to sniff out drugs, not to be unleashed on a college campus. Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t recall anyone mentioning the use of dogs to contain last December’s Southwest riots, but then again, most of those responsible for the riots were not members of the ALANA community.

One could argue, however stupid it may sound, that it could have been a standard security procedure. To protect the students from themselves, right? There is absolutely no basis for that argument, since there were at least three parties that I know of, going on the Friday and Saturday of that weekend. One was the Orchard Hill Bowl party, the other a frat house party. I talked to two people who had been to both. Both said that it was great that there weren’t any policemen there, so they could do pretty much whatever they wanted to do. The girl who went to the frat house party complained about a beer can that hit a car, with shards of glass almost hitting her face, but maintained that there weren’t any policemen to see the party in full swing. No, of course not. All their forces were focused on “keeping order” at the Cage. Six police cars were parked in the road leading from Haigis Mall on Saturday, just waiting for something, anything to happen. Pop a button and the tear gas comes out. How could this university allow this kind of terror to mobilize itself on the community? The African-American and ALANA communities are already a minority on this campus, reduced to having weekends like this to affirm their presence and sense of community belonging. To infringe upon their right to assemble is to validate the Bull Connors of this world, right here in “liberal” Massachusetts.

I wish I could call it what is: a hate crime, all the more unbearable than other hate crimes, because it is deeply institutionalized in how this school operates. The boyfriend of a friend of mine was pulled over and harassed for one and a half hours, all because he was Hispanic. Putting a border around his license plate got him pulled over, wrangled about whether he possessed drugs, whose keyboard he had in the back of his car (his own, by the way), and then, had his license taken away from him, because they had no proof against him. Race is a dirty word, so we clean it up with pretty buildings, diversity commissions and happy pictures of Comcol students who made it “despite” their skin colors, which stubbornly, won’t fade away, no matter how many Garganos and Lombardis come and go. I think the entire UMass community deserves an explanation from the UMPD, and an apology for having to spend a safe night on campus, in fear of those employed to protect them.

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