Week 5

Camille Joy Abutin

Week 5 

Section A01

We often neglect to take into account the affects of militarism and warfare in the university. It would be wrong to ignore the fact that these two things have made an impact on race, class, gender, sexuality and religion. Ultimately, what we see now in the university is a culture war between the dominant white and everyone else. From what I’ve gathered from “Imperial University,” by  Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira and Darrell Y. Hamamoto's "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civil Violence”, we go through most of our education believing societal norms and that western society is the standard of these norms and everything else is subversive. As a result, individuals become obsessed with exerting this dominance over others by actively oppressing other cultural differences and normalizing those acts of oppression. In the stories of serial killers outlines by Hamamoto, many killers were veterans or influenced by veterans during the vietnam war and often picked their prey because they knew they could overpower them. Even in the university, when students try to fight against the oppression, they are often called too political or too sensitive. 

Like most of my peers, whom I’ve spoken to about these two readings, the conversations about militarism and warfare in the university reminded me of the pepper spray incident at UC Davis. The incident was mentioned in the Imperial University speech; however, I would like to highlight the question: “Does militarism currently have a place on campus, and why?” because in my opinion, these things shouldn’t have  place on campus; however, they currently do. The military grade pepper spray, body armor, batons… who is our administration raging war on? Students? Are students the enemy? 

1.Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. 

2.Hamamoto, D. Y. (2003). Empire of death and the plague of civil violence. In Boggs, C. (Ed.), Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (pp. 272-296). New York, New York: Routledge.

3.[Pepper spraying of a young black girl]. (2012). Retrieved April 30, 2017, from http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/204035-casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop