From the Public Editor | Stay Angry: Keep Wrenchgate's Alive
February 2This week marks two months since the Tufts community received an e-mail with the subject, "Safety alert: suspicious person reported with a handgun." Generally, campus reaction came in stages: shock, then humor — certainly I wasn't the only one to chuckle at the absurdity of the mix-up between a ratchet wrench and the supposed gun — followed by the rapid deployment of wrench/gun posters, then other posters which reacted to the first round of posters. By some accounts, there was even third round of posters plastered around campus, reacting to reactive posters themselves. For many, these posters had a sobering effect: Suddenly the ludicrous, if not comical, scenario of assuming a black man was handling a gun turned into a pointed critique of the reality of race on campus. Without a doubt, the incident got people talking, and the provocative posters helped to this end. The students who put them up deserve to be commended for bringing the conversation beyond e-mails and articles to a public space impossible to miss. Yet perhaps most frustrating of the wrench/gun incident is how quickly it faded from the campus consciousness. Two months later, is anyone thinking about the fallout?
