Monday, November 21, 2011

Jon Wiener, U.C. Davis and "soul force"


From across town, U.C. Irvine history professor Jon Wiener weighs in at The Nation on the events at UC Davis and beyond:
Two unforgettable videos flew around the world wide web on Saturday, one horrifying, the other inspiring. Everybody knows the first: black-clad cops at UC Davis shooting pepper-spray into the faces of Occupy Wall Street student demonstrators who are sitting passively on the ground with linked arms. More than two million people have watched that video on YouTube—you might title it “the whole world is watching.”

But there’s a second video, shot the next night, that is amazing in a different way: it shows the chancellor of UC Davis, Linda P.B. Katehi, walking to her car after a press conference, with hundreds of students lining her path on one side, sitting on the ground with linked arms – like the students in the first, famous video – but now in a silent protest against the violence she presided over. This video is titled “walk of shame.” [See video above]

The Davis students’ message is clear: we are not the violent ones. We’re not like you. We stand for a different kind of world. And: your violence is not working. We are not afraid. It’s the message of the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1960s, of Martin Luther King, who spoke of “meet­ing phys­i­cal force with soul force.”
To read "Pepper Spray on Campus: A Tale of Two Videos" in its entirety, click here.

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• Pepper Spray Outrage (Inside Higher Ed)
• An Open Letter to Chancellor Katehi of the University of California, Davis (Inside Higher Ed)
• UC Davis police chief put on leave after protesters pepper sprayed (OC Reg)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might want to read what Dean Dad has to say in his blog, "Confessions of a Community College Dean."

Roy Bauer said...

Thanks, I posted a link

Anonymous said...

Our campus police carry guns, don't they? I've always thought that unnecessary. I hope there is a policy in place of how to handle student protests peacefully.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...