Section A03
Week 5
As evident of the national government spending, one of the White House's main priorities is the military. This attitude has trickled down to the state. We see this a lot in Black Lives Matter movements and other protests on college campuses; if the state does not agree with how a group of people are acting, then the state will put the clamps on them with military force, even if it started as a peaceful event. An example of this was seen at the UC Riverside Occupy movement. UC Riverside students were protesting tuition hikes in the student commons and the "police officers and other law enforcement agents are in full gear and out in full force." The Riverside SWAT team escorted the UC Regents "in what looked like a secret service mission and military cavalcade, fit for royalty: regents, indeed" (Chatterjee, 2014.) The use of militarized force on any protest--peaceful included--has been normalized. Students at higher education are enriched with knowledge at their universities. When they see the wrongdoing on campus, they protest, but they are soon shut down by militarized campus police with riot gear and pepper spray. Phrases like "Davis Dozen" and "Irvine 11" are being used to label the victims of the protests, similar to how groups of victims are labeled after a massacre. Critics call this phenomenon "Imperial University" because university administrators are demonstrating their power through military force. Minority communities suffer from this, because many of the protests support the minority communities and the struggles that they go through. Campus administrators call on military force to shut down the protests, when the students are the ones who are trying to shape their campus.
The comic below shows how protesters are met with military force. People calling for justice and equality are painted as criminals.
Question: How do we invoke change without being met with brute force?
Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: academic repression and scholarly dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rogers, R. (n.d.). Confrontation [Cartoon]. In Getintoon.
No comments:
Post a Comment