Don't be like Mike at Guilford College
This week's column.
"Thou shalt not park here," says a sign near the entrance of New Garden Friends Meeting.
The friendly warning reflects, in many ways, the Quaker tenets of openness, good humor and gentle resolve.
I have attended several services there and have always been taken by the peaceful spirit of those sessions.
I'm particularly impressed by the Quakers' practice of quiet reflection — of just sitting there in long stretches of meditative silence and of speaking only when they had something to say.
As a Baptist, I am used to more, uh, frenetic Sunday mornings, where a preacher might work up a bigger sweat than an NBA forward. But I appreciate the Quakers' courage to hear the sounds of their breathing and heartbeats, and to stare into their hearts and souls, without needing something else to fill the silence. And I admire their willingness to slow down and think things through.
Those tenets are being tested now, as Guilford College wrangles with the type of controversy that you'd expect anywhere but there. Five Guilford football players have been arrested in the alleged assaults of three Palestinian students — two who attend Guilford and one who was visiting from N.C. State.
The athletes have been charged by Greensboro police with assault and battery as well as ethnic intimidation. The three Palestinian students, whose injuries included concussions and a broken nose, say the attacks, early on Jan. 20, were unprovoked. They also say racial slurs, such as "camel jockeys" and "sand niggers," accompanied the beatings.
The episode has thrust the little northwest Greensboro Quaker school into the national news and embroiled a campus known for its pacifist ideals in a heated debate about hate and violence.
So Guilford students, faculty and staff crammed into the main sanctuary of New Garden Friends Meeting, across the street from the Quaker college, for an emotional forum on Wednesday. They filled every inch of every pew and spilled into the vestibule and down the hall. And they vented.
Why was the administration taking so long to discipline the football players?
Why were the players released on only a $2,000 bond?
Why had the school acted so quickly to deal with this situation but not the ongoing problems suffered by African American students.
(Ironically, however, two of the alleged assailants are African American).
Here's exactly what happened, said one female student, with great certainty and authority: The Palestinian students were accosted and called names and beaten by a gang of football players. She knew it had occurred in precisely this way, she said, because someone told her so.
This was a hate crime, said another speaker.
Yet another decried the stereotyping of athletes at Guilford. "I feel hatred toward my athlete son," he said.
Meanwhile, near the back door, a group of students who appeared to be football players (they wouldn't talk to reporters) periodically shook their heads in disagreement as they heard speakers' references to racial slurs and the alleged use of brass knuckles in the assault.
There was little consensus in the room, where passions and opinions ran the gamut. There was fear, anger, frustration and impatience.
Incredibly, however, for the most part everyone listened respectfully to everyone else. I can't picture the same kind of restraint and civility on any other campus.
Interestingly, on the same day Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was watching his career implode for making reckless, monumental assumptions in another case involving students, athletes, race and an alleged assault.
Nifong faces charges from the state bar that he not only misrepresented the facts in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case but that he withheld crucial DNA evidence and lied about it to judges and the state bar. We thought we knew all the facts of that case with the same certainty as some Guilford students, whose second- and third-hand accounts may or may not be accurate.
A premature public verdict in this case would do a terrible disservice to all of the parties, as it has done at Duke.
For instance, the plot twists in the Duke case may make it harder for a rape victim somewhere to come forward in the future. (It's already difficult enough.) Misinformation in the Guilford case could be similarly damaging in attempts to stem prejudicial attitudes and hateful actions against people of Middle Eastern descent.
This is not to say the initial accounts aren't true. But a healthy dose of Quaker reflection and deliberation would be helpful right now.
At the end of Wednesday's forum, one of the students I had suspected was a football player hesitated for a moment, then confirmed his identity. Martin Brown, a sophomore left tackle from Washington, D.C., had yelled loudly during one speaker's cautions not to rush to judgment, "Friend speaks my mind," the Quaker version of a Baptist's "Amen."
"I'm not trying to say what happened was right at all," Brown said. "But I don't like the words 'hate crime' being thrown around without all the details."
Friend speaks my mind.
Comments (17)
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Where did you see this get "National" attention? And in my humble non-Quaker opinion, the statement from one venting student "...but not the ongoing problems suffered by the African American students..."--that comment is EXACTLY what feeds these frenzies.
One fight, make it racial/ethnic in nature-- and then it can be taken it all the way to court.
So if they football players had yelled, "Baby-butt!"...or "Big Mamas Boy!"...or "Pickle Puss"...then it wouldn't be considered "ethnic intimididation?
Give me a BREAK!!!!! What are we teaching our kids--to yell RACE when we're caught for no other explanation? A fight occured, let's call it a FIGHT, dole out the punishments and get on with it. Does ethnicity and heritage have to be dragged into every inch of life in Guilford County?
Also, the media and N&R would like to make it sound like Guilford is "wrangling" with this episode. I don't recall any Guilford official saying they were "wrangling" with the issue. They'll handle it just fine. It's the media that is hoping it will turn into something huge like at Duke.
Fights happen every day. I was just at a Guilford County middle school and heard the F-word and Mother used SEVERAL times. The police came, etc.. Really, no different. It's just that the N&R and local TV channels got their hands on the perfect story at Guilford because of Quaker traditions.
Shame on you for exploiting this into something more than it really was--a stupid fight amongst college students.
Geez Allen, didn't you live on campus during college? It happens ALL THE TIME.
Posted on January 28, 2007 9:59 AM
Alan, you have misstated that these players were "charged by Greensboro police" when in fact we all know they were not. John Robinson and others have acknowledged days ago that this is incorrect, didn't you get the memo?? Criminal papers were sworn out by the alleged victims in this case, not the police.
This altercation was not serious enough for the Greensboro Police to even be called to the scene. Misstatements by the local news media and their desire to "pump it up" for some national attention smacks of an overzealous press willing to slant, distort, and manufacture "facts" to enlarge their readership/listenership.
Report the news, please, don't make it.
Posted on January 28, 2007 11:03 AM
This story has received considerable national attention, including an article in yesterday's New York Times that erroneously stated that police had filed charges.
Here's the Google News page of links to coverage, including ABC, MSNBC, Forbes, and papers across the country:
http://news.google.com/nwshp?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wn&ncl=1112967714
Posted on January 28, 2007 2:52 PM
The problem is that Guilford college is too diversified.
Posted on January 28, 2007 10:56 PM
Allen:
In your column today, you wrote: “The athletes have been charged by the Greensboro Police with assault and battery as well as ethnic intimidation.”
On Wednesday evening, John Robinson wrote the following sentence on his blog: “The police have arrested the three players and charged them with crimes. While some may wish that the charges – again, made by police, including ethnic intimidation, not the newspaper –are worth only a paragraph or two, this kind of alleged beating on a college campus is bigger than that.”
Apparently, both of you gentlemen got this same impression from the early reports in the news media (including your newspaper).
The five defendants were not “charged by Greensboro police.” The charges that were lodged against the five football players were not filed by the Greensboro Police Department after a criminal investigation into the incident. Instead, the charges were the result of affidavits provided by the alleged victims to the magistrate. The Greensboro Police Department simply served the arrest warrants on the accused athletes. This is an important distinction.
There was an interesting discussion of this topic on JR’s blog on Thursday.
Posted on January 28, 2007 11:39 PM
Maybe the football players didn't yell racial slurs. If they did, hypothetically, I gather most of the bloggers on this thread think that's just a sort of "boys will be boys" thing to do.
What are people teaching their boys to do and say? I saw five minutes of poker on TV today; all burly false bravado. Plus, none-too-subtle anti-homosexual innuendo...on national TV. Great.
So, if my hypothetical is in play, do you think a group of boys (hardly worth calling men, to my thinking) do go out and beat the tar out of people they clearly have major prejudices against, since they start yelling racial nasties at them throughout the beatings, ought we to just slap 'em on the wrists and send them off for a nice big honkin' slob-fest at the cafeteria? Yee-haw!
Or might we consider trying to instill some civility into the rapscallions by making clear we, as society, will not tolerate violence, and most certainly not the virulent hatred spewed about with impunity that feeds it?
Posted on January 29, 2007 12:38 AM
Mr. Langer:
I'd suggest we let this process play out and see what actually happened rather than rush to judgment about what these students did. Jumping to conclusions about what the others here might think or what might have happened in this fight serve no purpose. We don't "clearly" know what prejudices these players have (or the alleged victims, for that matter) as yet, simply because we don't know what happened yet.
Just a suggestion.
Posted on January 29, 2007 8:12 AM
Jim,
Were you there? Did you personally witness this event?
If so, you need to give your statement to the police, otherwise, listen to Sam.
Posted on January 29, 2007 8:54 AM
Silence! This is between the students and their families. Even the kids at Guilford have enough sense to SHUT up about it! They are gathering to support ALL their peers through prayer and NOT contributing to the EXPLOITATION that the N&R is praying for!
Sh................ Let the officials at Guilford handle this. I think we'll all learn a lot from how they do it.
Now, shush and go on about your OWN business.
Posted on January 29, 2007 9:04 AM
Wendell and Jaycee are correct. The police are conducting an investigation based on charges filed by the alleged victims.
Thanks for setting mre straight on that distinction.
Posted on January 29, 2007 3:11 PM
Wow...unusual for me to see honor like you have demonstrated...cool.
Posted on January 29, 2007 8:45 PM
No, I wasn't there. You clearly didn't read my post very closely. I made a direct distinction between this "actual" case and a "hypothetical" one (notice I said "IF my hypothetical is in PLAY"...and "A group of boys"....I did not say "so, I am sure that THESE Guilford students really DID use racial slurs as THESE exact same actual Guilford College students really DID beat up on THESE actual Palestinian students on such and such an actual night", or anything approaching that).
My purpose is not to try these particular students; it is to discuss the basic ethical principles involved in how we as a society would choose to reward and punish certain behaviors. Do we enforce taboos? Do we allow young men to act in ways that might lead to violence of the sort being alleged, with impunity?
I agree we should not rush to judgement about this case; but does that mean we stop discussing hypothetically what the limits of our laws should include? Are all "hate crimes" redundant, and violence itself the only cause for alarm? Or can we address crimes that are to be found to have arisen from racial, ethnic and/or religious hatred as being somehow especially troublesome and potentially contagious?
If these particular college students are not found to have done violence either as first aggressors nor in the name of hatred for Muslims, I will be very happy for them. There will still remain issues we must address.
Posted on January 30, 2007 12:16 AM
And demanding silence on ethical, philosophical questions is what leads to tyranny.
Posted on January 30, 2007 12:19 AM
Don't Be Like Allen:
I did live on campus, for most of undergrad and graduate school, and I don't recall seeing one fight. Of course, I went to school at a bastion of refinement and wine-and-cheese restraint, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Seriously, "it happens all the time" seems to me a fairly lame excuse for any kind of campus violence. And one that begs documentation.
Posted on January 30, 2007 6:09 AM
Allen,
My "It happens all the time" comment was not an excuse for these boys. I was trying to make the point that fights happen everywhere--even homeless shelters-- and punishment should follow.
What I hope doesn't become of our society is that every fight has some long, deep-seeded ethnic or racial hate tag attached to it, nor do we need the big, bad Truth and Reconciliation committe to do re-enactments of every crime and drag unfortunate events out for 50 years.
So, do you think the stabbing at the shelter was a hate crime or just a bunch of people in a bad mood because there were not enough cots on a cold night? And will the N&R report this everyday for the next month? And do you think the Truth and Reconciliation folks will be meeting to get their claws in this story?
Posted on January 30, 2007 10:34 AM
What's so special about campus violence? Just because something happens on campus, it's more important than things that happen off-campus? (John Robinson says yes.)
Good column, though. There's such a huge rush to moral allegory in such cases, no one really cares about the facts.
Jim, you're not talking in a hypothetical vacuum: you're talking about an ethical judgment that may or may not apply to a specific incident. Disavowing that that incident is relevant to your ethical hypothesis is disingenuous.
Posted on January 30, 2007 2:35 PM
Disallowing hypothetical discussion, even if carefully bracketed off from real-time events with specific wording, would render all moral reasoning on a philosophical level untenable. This, in turn, would forbid education as it has been practiced since the Greeks.
If we are not able to have dispassionate, rational discourse, we are doomed as a democratic society.
Posted on January 31, 2007 10:57 AM