Guest column by Peter LaBerge and Amanda Silberling | On Incendiary: Why we need to stop tuning out

(T his piece employs a collective “I,” representing the opinions of both authors.)

“I charge the United States of America with genocide.”

This is how College senior Victoria Ford began her final poem “Elegy” on Friday night at Incendiary, The Excelano Project’s fall 2014 show. Ford walked to the center of the stage holding a large scroll with the names and ages of 95 black murder victims. After reading each name, she shared a heart-breaking report of how the murderers were not prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The audience was both stunned and speechless. As Ford progressed through the chilling list, the paper she held inched forward as it unrolled, then dangled, then found the floor. At the end of the performance, the list was itself a kind of body: limp, curled into itself and quiet, embodying the pain of so many victims and families.

Over the past few weeks, there have been two days during which the student group Students Organizing for Unity and Liberation has put red handprints on people’s bodies. The first handprint represented the decision not to indict Michael Brown’s murderer as a slap in the face. The second was a handprint around people’s necks, intended to show how Eric Garner was choked until he could no longer breathe.

I didn’t wear the red paint either time. Maybe it was because I didn’t know where to get the handprints, or because I felt too caught up in academic stress to really immerse myself in these issues. Don’t get me wrong: I fully support and encourage the actions of groups like SOUL. When I saw my classmates and friends wearing the red paint, it made me proud to know them and to be a Quaker. So why wasn’t I wearing the paint?

As a white person, it’s easy for me to choose cramming for an exam over finding out where to get a red handprint on my body. It’s easy for me to watch a walkout occur just blocks away while I merely retweet a picture in solidarity. But I’m not doing this country justice if my only attempts at activism are statuses, retweets and reblogs. White privilege allows me to selectively tune in and tune out of these protests — to nod in approval at my friends who get their faces painted, reblog a few protest photos on Tumblr and then resume my regular schedule. On Friday, Ford and The Excelano Project reminded us that this relative ambivalence is not enough.

Penn students are lucky to engage in a community that — for the most part — understands that the issues raised in Ford’s poem are worthy of alarm and must be addressed. We are lucky that we live, study and grow in a place where it’s OK (even encouraged) to cultivate original thought and advocate for a better, safer America.

As a white person, I will never know what it’s like to face racial discrimination. I will never know what it’s like to fear that my young cousins will be shot in broad daylight for playing with toy guns. But while I don’t know what it’s like, I know that it’s happening, and I know that I want it to end.

This is white privilege: being outraged, but not terrified. And I know that if I opt to remain unaware and uneducated for fear of standing up or saying something stupid, I’m a part of the problem.

So, what’s the solution? For starters, we must adopt a mindset that allows our views to be reflected by our voices and actions — we must participate in the walkouts and wear the red paint if we believe in the power of calls for change. We must, as video blogger Franchesca Ramsey says, “S peak up, not over .” At the end of the day, unlearning problematic things is difficult, and it’s possible we could make a few mistakes in the process. But we must remember that it’s our responsibility to listen when we’re called out, to apologize and to open our eyes as we move forward.

About halfway through Ford’s performance, she stepped back from the microphone, wiped away her tears, collected herself and charged onward. Ford did what each of us could only hope we would have the strength to do: speak in spite of the hand gripping her throat.

Peter LaBerge is a College sophomore from Stamford, CT. His email address is plaberge@sas.upenn.edu.

Amanda Silberling is a College freshman from Boca Raton, FL. Her email address is asilb@sas.upenn.edu

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