Ian Saxine Columnist

Ever since I came to Vassar in 2002, I had thought that an intelligent, socially conscious college such as ours would have a lot to teach the world through our own examples. Boy, was I wrong. The ruckus surrounding The Imperialist incident rammed home the point that rather than being a beacon of progressive light in a foggy world, we are more of a laughingstock. I am referring, of course, not to the content of The Imperialist but rather in the embarrassingly bad way it was handled.

Led by the Students Allied for Equality and Justice, (SAEJ) Vassar’s own self-appointed crusaders for justice, we scream about the need for “dialogue,” while simultaneously working to shut down the only real publication on campus that expressed some sort of disagreement with Vassar’s collective worldview. But SAEJ isn’t the only new group on campus established to insure that we can all get into ideological lockstep. We also have a new body for reviewing the content and activity for all Vassar student organizations. Supporters of these groups justify these developments by pointing out that the Nazis from Overthrow.com got involved, so clearly The Imperialist was an organ of the Nazis. Judging from the unreasonable outcry on campus, M.I.C.A. and The Imperialist summoned those Nazis, perhaps via some bat-signal device from their headquarters. Never mind that the Nazis heard about the whole controversy from either The Miscellany News or outside news sources, and that Nazis have a habit of butting in without being asked.

SAEJ needs to be taken less seriously, because by blurring the distinction between SAEJ critics and outright racists, that organization is behaving all too much like the man this campus claims to despise so much.

That’s right. George Bush and the students in SAEJ are not so different after all. True, they sit on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but their methods and personalities do not. Both of them have proclaimed themselves the leader of a noble crusade against the very incarnation of evil. Both of you sit before me, either on TV or in the Retreat, barking at me that I’m either with you or against you. Just as the administration would call my patriotism into question for not giving the war in Iraq my wholehearted support, you seem eager to condemn me, and others like me, for not going along on your increasingly unreasonable witch hunt. And to both of you I say, enough!

I can’t go along with SAEJ in launching their “Operation Vassar Freedom” in our very own backyard. I will not join them as they make a laughingstock of the anti-racist movement at this school. While supporting their goal of eliminating discrimination in all its forms, I must condemn, no, mock, their ham-fisted tactics. For months now, they have been trying to defame anyone who doesn’t agree with their stilted version of events. The ill-founded accusations that M.I.C.A. somehow tipped off the Nazis at overthrow.com, or worse, wrote that offensive posting themselves, have not received the ridicule and censure they deserve. Using tactics that Senator Joe McCarthy would have been proud of, certain SAEJ resorts to the label of “subtle racism” whenever they see an argument with which they disagree.

For an example of a rational response to hatred or dissent, we need only to look a few towns over. Two weeks ago in Kingston, a black kid and a white kid got into a fight at the local high school. School authorities said it was just kids being kids, but the white student’s mother saw things differently, contacting Hal Turner, a white-supremacist radio figure, about the supposed racial violence. That radio host organized a hate rally, thinly veiled as a “rally against violence.” Nobody was fooled, and the day before the rally took place, an interfaith peace vigil was held as Kingston expressed its solidarity against hatred. The rally itself was a flop, with less than 50 skinheads, Nazis and their cronies showing up, and perhaps 200 counter-protesters bothering to attend. Hal Turner said his piece, Kingston shrugged it off and showed that it did not support racist blather, and everyone went on with their business. One alderman explained to one newspaper that Kingston was a community of tolerance, but, “unfortunately, free speech puts forth views that we don’t always agree with.” (Why can’t this person speak at Vassar?) And that was that.

To be clear: my problem with developments on campus is that instead of attacking real racism where it has a significant foothold, like in the larger community, SAEJ is diverting our attention in an artless attempt to bully non-radicals and, yes, even conservatives, into silence as they engage in some intellectual blacklisting of their own. And instead of superficial accusations (“Vassar discriminates in its hiring of professors!”) we could work on fixing the real cause of the problems we face, like the institutional inequities of American schools that produce far too few qualified minority candidates in the first place.

So go ahead, SAEJ, call me a racist. But remember, criticism of your tactics is not the same as racism. Do you know what I did the night of The Imperialist dialogue? I went home to plan a lesson for the tenth graders I’ve been student-teaching for the past semester about how concepts of who is a “real” American are often based on race and ethnicity. They have been discussing and learning about inequality, class, religion, race, and a host of other topics. And they didn’t even need to attend a rally to do it. Imagine that.