My favorite scene in "Forrest Gump" (1994) is during Forest's impromptu running campaign, when a group of reporters chases after him to find out why he's running. "Are you doing this for world peace? The environment?" They ask. Innocent Forrest's motives were much simpler: He "just felt like running."
An op−ed in Monday's Daily tried to respond to the public's inquiry regarding what I will refer to as the Ratchetgate scandal in similar Gumpian style. By Ratchetgate, I mean the scandal with the recent posters depicting a black hand holding a wrench and labeled "gun" and a white hand holding a wrench labeled "wrench." Allegedly, the poster's originators just felt like encouraging dialogue.
I don't buy this defense of Ratchetgate. Sure, it might have sparked a dialogue, but I believe the true intent of these posters was no different from any post−bias, sensitivity−awareness session. It was a cheap attempt to capitalize on an honest mistake. Because of this, I dedicate Ban Together's final installment to banning dialogue.
"But why would you want to ban dialogue? You love dialogue! Wasn't your column designed to increase dialogue?" you ask.
No: My column and others like it advance opinions in order to persuade others. If a discussion ensues, great. The people behind Ratchetgate are of a different creed. They're reactionaries taking advantage of the interpretability of an event they read about in an e−mail and simulated in their minds. They seem to have never seen the ratchet; they couldn't even portray it correctly on the posters still littering our campus. Yet we're supposed to ignore this because their intent was benign — to encourage dialogue. In reality, they want dialogue, so long as it reinforces the myth that we're all racist.
It brings me back to the moment the Primary Source published a critique of affirmative action via song, or when then−freshman In−Goo Kwak parodied a Tufts Community Union senator's campaign ad or when then−freshman Daniel Foster called some Korean students very bad names while intoxicated.
Yet Ratchetgate differs from these incidents. There is no witch to burn, no goat to scape. Protesters now must resort to blaming the entire student body for someone's mistake instead of doing it through a boogieman. As long as they can advance an agenda that I believe discourages others from talking about subjects even remotely related to race, the nature of the event itself matters little.
Ratchetgate was not a benevolent call for increased tolerance or self−reflection. It was a shoddily put−together, poorly−veiled attempt to once again tame and shame the Jumbo herd into an obeisant, guilt−ridden harem of seals. Its only purpose was to point out our flaws in making snap judgments and the obvious necessity of our own dependency on enlightened beacons of true diversity, be it in the form of indoctrinating professors, community representatives or diversity task forces. Individuals refusing to accept this guilt are brought down easily with accusations of racism or bigotry, which, like dog droppings, are easily flung but difficult to remove.
Such shaming isn't unique to Tufts. A 2008 study by, among others, our very own Associate Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers points out that nowadays "whites … strategically [avoid] the topic of race because they're worried that they'll look bad if they admit they notice it in other people."
The study concludes that "bending over backward to avoid even mentioning race sometimes creates more interpersonal problems than it solves." We can benefit from talking about race but only when we're freed from the reactionary contexts forged by narrow−minded students whose goal is a prolonged fixation on inconsequential events in which someone somewhere might have done something that could potentially be considered racist. It is these dialogues we can do without.
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