I don’t really know if Oberlin overreacted or not. I don’t really know any details, just conjecture from a bunch of different sources, after the fact.
What I do know is, as a non-white person, if I saw a Klansman on my campus, or heard about one that was definitely there, and nobody did anything or said anything, I’d assume the college was comfortable about having that kind of blatant racism displayed there. I wouldn’t go so far as to switch my college or anything but I’d always have a bad taste in my mouth from that college, and always harbor a bit of suspicion.
What Oberlin was trying to do, it seems, was send a clear message: that shit is not acceptable here. Maybe white people can afford to be casually dismissive of a Klansman walking across campus. I don’t think the rest of us are ready to just let it go yet.
Yeah, I worded that wrong. I should’ve said something like ‘the KKK plays a bigger role in American cultural consciousness than the Dominican order’. I’d bet the mental image of the Klansman in white robe and hood is much more widespread, and much more highly charged, than the mental image of the Dominican habit.
I wondered about that - if it was about affirming the college’s collective identity. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do, but a shutdown is still a weird way to go about it. It implies that you’re intimidated, whereas you’d expect an affirmation of identity to be geared towards expressing ‘We’re not scared of you, motherfucker.’
That makes a certain amount of sense. Being from outside the US, I don’t have enough in-depth understanding of the cultural climate to know whether I think it was an appropriate reaction in those terms or not, but I get what you’re saying.
I’m not talking about whether shutting down campus was an overreaction or not (and I’m certainly not saying they should have ‘just let it go’). I’m saying it strikes me as an *odd *reaction, because it doesn’t seem to address the problem in any way. If they’d responded by, say, covering every inch of the campus with CCTV cameras till they caught the people responsible for the hate campaign and supposed Klansman outfit - then maybe it would have been an overreaction, maybe not, but it would have been a reaction that was targeted at doing something concrete about the problem.
There are other options besides ‘Do and say nothing’ and ‘Do something that doesn’t do anything.’