COLUMN: Campus practices closet racism

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by Apollo Amoko

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Beyond the specific offensive police actions that Helena Michie and Betty Joseph discussed, I am interested in the role that race plays in the larger processes of Rice community definition. Specifically, I want to talk about the racist implications of "the discourse of the stranger" that pervades this campus. For, I was, in so many words, the "racialized" victim of that discourse.

If I were to accept everything I read and hear (both officially and unofficially), I would believe that innumerable "strangers" lurked everywhere just beyond Rice's hedges. Such "suspicious and/or lost" strangers apparently pose both immanent and imminent danger to the well-being of the Rice "community." Everyone is encouraged to be on the lookout for the emergence of such strangers.

The mere suspicion of the presence of such strangers on campus demands immediate and disproportionate police attention. The discourse nervously denies any margins for error or misrecogni- tion; such is the terrifying power of the stranger. What is not ever mentioned, at least officially, is the fact that the category "stranger" is racially charged.

Thrice in a 10-day period I painfully found out that -- my status as a student notwithstanding -- as a black man, I was regarded as one of the potentially dreaded strangers. Without ever having done anything wrong, I become the unwilling object of public scrutiny by police officers. (In the first instance I was stereotypically "lost," in the second stereo- typically "suspicious.")

As disturbing and traumatic as these incidents were, they simply do not compare with what I endured in the next two months at the hands of self-assured officials and pretentious students.

In effect, I was called upon over and over again to accept that, in order to keep out the "real strangers," the Rice community must retain the unfettered right to question anyone reported, however erroneously, as suspicious.

As a black man who has just suffered unprovoked police harassment -- officials and fellow students implied to me -- my "inconvenience" was inevitable to ensure the security of the Rice community. The discourse of the stranger conspired to make my complaints against police harassment "trivial" and/or "exaggerated." I was accused, among other things, of blowing things out of proportion.

Amid ambiguous and spurious "apologies," I was emphatically told, absurdly, the police actions were intended for "my own good" and were not racist. After all, nobody ever called me "nigger" or "boy" or hit me.

The implication here is that if a self-righteous community restricts itself to trying to keep out the real strangers, it cannot possibly be racist regardless of who gets picked out as probable strangers. It does not matter that the category, stranger, is racially determined.

It does not matter that racism cannot possibly be all contained in the one inflamed word or in spectacular and sensational acts of violence. It does not matter that in certain contexts "stranger" and "nigger" are fundamentally interchangeable; "nigger" may only be a little more honest. Communal safety becomes a rationale for racism.

Many students and officials implied over and over again that, in persisting with my complaints, I was being "oversensitive" -- and self-absorbed. Being called oversensitive, even by some students and officials allegedly "on my side," is telling.

After all, no one accused the police department of being "excessive" or "oversensitive" when, in response to one reported robbery, they recently posted scores of racially inflamed look-out-for-the-suspicious-black-male-strangers "crime alerts."

No one once condemned the officers who stopped me for frivolous -- and racist -- reasons as "oversensitive." No one denounced the presumptuous professor who allegedly called the police on me as "oversensitive" or "self-absorbed."

And no one condemned the self-important busybody "officials" at the Graduate House as "oversensitive" when they informally encourage police officers to violate the privacy and personal dignity of completely innocent students.

The system works in such a way that everyone can justify the most outrageous and egregious conduct by invoking the discourse of the ubiquitous stranger. Oversensitivity becomes the exclusive preserve of the black man who resists the construction of his body as a self-evidently suspect or lost object. Where, then, is any sense of proportion in all this, I wonder?

If the actions of the two "rogue" police officers marked me as the notorious and stereotypical figure of the stranger, subsequent actions by many other officials and students did little to change that racist construction. I am tempted to say, in closing, that the two officers were fundamentally engaged in Rice community building.

By marking my body with "suspicion" and/or "lostness," they merely made explicit ideas that had previously been implicit. That is, I -- and others like me -- am always potentially suspect or lost in the Rice community as it self-righteously defines itself in opposition to those like me.

The choices confronting this university as it enforces its sense of community are not complicated. The university can continue to pretend that its students are one, that all those associated with it are perpetually indistinguishable parts of a homogenous system.

Or it can choose to acknowledge the "strangers" it has within its hedges. It can choose, beyond the current disingenuous obsession with racial admission statistics, to confront the pervasive culture of racism that this incident illustrates. For me, at this stage, that choice has already been made and almost everywhere reaffirmed. And it is not one that I can or intend to live with.

Apollo Amoko is a graduate student in the English Department.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the January 24, 1997 issue.

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