Poetry Manuscripts Panic Pennsylvania College

Kazim Ali, an instructor at Shippensburg University in central Pennsylvania, left a box of papers beside a campus trash can in front of the building where he taught after work, like he had many times before, so that they could be picked up and recycled. The box contained poetry manuscripts, left over from a contest Ali had judged.

The English department at Shippensburg shares a building with the ROTC program. An alert cadet observed a foreign-looking man leave a suspicious box on campus and drive away in a car with out-of-state license plates. The vigilant defender of American freedom called the local police, who in turn alerted the Pennsylvania state troopers. An emergency was declared, and the campus was shut down and evacuated.

Ali writes:

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us safe. ...

At some length several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. "When I recycle?" I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an "honest mistake," not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan. ...

What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall--who was watched, noted, and reported, all in a days work? Today we gave in willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and fascist societies. ...

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.

(via Elise Matthesen)