Kaba was saying she shouldn’t have been surprised because, she and Ritchie argue, “Policing itself announces a form of insecurity in the culture and in this society, and then it sucks nutrients out of our system. It actually makes everything less safe, just the presence and existence [of police]… Inserting policing within spaces where young people would like to congregate is just a recipe for escalation and violence.” Two years after Uvalde, we’re seeing that as more than a thousand students are targeted for their protest.
It’s also impossible not to mention that students are protesting on their campuses in part because Gaza’s universities — a source of nutrients for residents — have been razed to the ground, with surviving students and academics forced to flee.
And while public officials like New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu claim the police presence is due to accusations of antisemitism made against the student movement, the police are also arresting and brutalizing Jewish students and professors. The Dartmouth professor who was arrested, 65-year-old Annelise Orleck, former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program, told WMUR, “As a Jewish woman of an age that grew up in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors and knew Holocaust survivors, I have to say that I think this is disingenuous. It’s a weaponizing of antisemitism for their own political purposes, which is to suppress dissent.”
On May 2, President Biden told the media that the arrest of hundreds of people who likely voted for him in 2020 left him unmoved on his policy after he had spent weeks criticizing them and changing the subject. We are just shy of seven months of war in Gaza. It is safe to assume the student movement will similarly be unmoved by his lack of action. The Democratic National Convention approaches this summer, so who do you think has more staying power: An 81-year-old defender of the police who has alienated many of his constituents or student protesters who have been facing down the cops since October? As the students keep chanting: “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.”
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