Vinay Harpalani: The importance of protesting

This week, Penn students will see a plethora of social activism. Today, there is an anti-war rally on College Green at 1 p.m., highlighting the most prominent issue on America's foreign policy agenda. This will build toward an anti-war march in Center City on Saturday. And tomorrow at 3:45 p.m., we will have a picket outside of the University Museum, where Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch opponent of affirmative action, will speak to a select audience. This is also one of many events, leading up to a national march in Washington, D.C., on April 1, when the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. Such visible protests are an exercise of our First Amendment rights -- but they mean much more. Massive, vocal protest is the reason for social change in America. Silence begets oppression, and it is only through vocal criticism and struggle that we gained any freedom. Unfortunately, many at Penn do not understand this, as illustrated by the recent criticism of Carlos Gomez. In his Martin Luther King Jr. Day poem, Gomez sharply rebuked the University and in particular President Rodin. He began with a quote from King: "There comes a time when silence is betrayal." Gomez highlighted Penn's displacement of West Philadelphia residents and its poor treatment of University employees, including graduate students, and he also criticized Penn's compliance with the USA PATRIOT Act. But Gomez's most condemned and most misunderstood remark was his reference to President Rodin as a "Nazi." His detractors assumed Gomez was equating Rodin to Adolf Hitler or to an Auschwitz SS guard. But most of the Nazi Party did not directly commit the horrible crimes for which Nazis are known. In the German elections of July 1932, a few months before Hitler took power, the Nazi Party garnered 13,745,000 votes. This constituted 37 percent of the total electorate, more than any other party. Most of these Nazi voters were not tyrants; they were everyday citizens who blindly adhered to the Nazis' nationalistic, xenophobic rhetoric. Nazi oppression began not with genocide but with privacy violations and the imprisonment of suspicious individuals -- not unlike the current provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. And even with the gross atrocities of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, most Nazis were not active participants, but merely passive and compliant. It was to these silent Nazis, not Hitler, that Gomez was referring. And all of us who silently allow injustices to occur are like those 14 million everyday people who brought the Nazis into power. We tell ourselves this could never happen in America -- the land of freedom. But let us remember that U.S. history has seen episodes as abhorrent as the Holocaust. We cannot forget that "peculiar institution" of black slavery, which lasted 250 years, followed by 100 more years of legal segregation. This country was built by the genocide of Native Americans -- a fact we try to ignore. Even when Native American groups were not exterminated, the U.S. government restricted them to reservations. And while the U.S. government has run out of land to steal from Native Americans, it has routinely broken its own treaties with them. Some think that it is inappropriate to criticize America's ugly history, especially given our vulnerability after Sept. 11, 2001. But no one can dispute this history, and it is silence, not truth, that allows such ugliness to occur. Of course, there have been changes for the better in America. The last 35 years have seen more opportunities for people of color. But even these advances came through vocal struggle and protest. And the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action threatens to negate these few gains, especially if Scalia has his way. So I encourage everyone to picket Scalia tomorrow and defend the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. He has consistently opposed civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and other important, progressive causes, and we should let the public know how we feel about his repugnant views. I also encourage everyone to attend today's anti-war rally. Contrary to President Bush's rhetoric, it is not war that protects our freedom, but rather anti-war protests. Fascism is not just created by tyrannical despots like Saddam Hussein; it arises from the compliance of people who do not challenge their government's nationalistic, militaristic agenda. As King said and Gomez reiterated, we betray ourselves if we remain silent. Some may accuse us of being anti-American, but history has shown that true patriotism means being critical, not compliant. America does allow us many rights and opportunities not available in much of the world. But it is only through direct and vocal criticism of our government that many Americans -- and especially people of color -- ever gained those rights at all. Vinay Harpalani is a Ph.D. candidate in Education and a Master's candidate in Bioethics from Newark, Del.

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