​Growing our activist culture

Throughout this year, we have lamented the growing violence of disagreement on campus and the seeming endlessness of the increase in volume required to be heard in “debates” that have become more like shouting matches on both local and national stages. These concerns manifested yet again on Friday when the “Kappa Kops” party, an annual incarceration-themed party hosted by two Greek organizations, was protested by a group of students, some of whom were asking for the abolition of both prisons and Greek life.

The student protesters sought to address a number of important issues including mass incarceration in the United States, racial inequity in rates of incarceration, the relative lack of diversity within fraternity and sorority life and the normalization of denying experiences allowed by Duke parties and similar events at other universities. During the day and afterwards, attendees of the protest and teach-in voiced concerns about how protesters responded to audience questions about their arguments and analogies made between Holocaust tragedies and problems with prisons. When an attendee stated that he largely agreed with the protesters but questioned their goal of prison abolition on the basis of prison injustices, the response to his concern included mention of his race as marker of his privileged ability to be heard, an ad hominem logical fallacy at best. When another student questioned the false analogy of injustices in the modern prison system and experimentation without consent on concentration camp prisoners in Nazi Germany, he was addressed in a mocking tone. Protesters also fell into the trap of argumentum ad passiones by appealing emptily to the tragic but emotionally charged killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice two years ago. These fallacies undermined the substance that could have been played up to attendees, raising questions about the value or counter-productivity of these kinds of protests.

It is important for activists to appropriately frame their actions with motivations. Expression of emotional frustration and rational discussion of issues are both appropriate responses to current events. However, without a clear articulation of the goals of a particular dialogue, whether emotional or rational, exchange becomes strained as both sides enter the discussion with fundamentally different purposes.

Protesters do have a right to express their emotion and opinion on a topic. However, in order for activism to be effective it must consider its audience and teach even when those it addresses may not feel the same emotional weight of the topic. More effective future teach-ins than what we saw last week would frame positions in advance, publicize the event and ask for attendance from diverse perspectives, then organize moderation that better facilitates an honest process of simply figuring things out. Attendees might advance debate by examining their own motivations critically rather than seeking to promote their own opinions, thus taking the opportunity to lay out the motivations for the conversation or how particular concern can be addressed even when positions seem desperately far apart or explosively reactive.

Ultimately, we must all strive to find the ethos and intellect in our discourse with others by focusing on the evidence available, the charitably considered content of our opponents’ arguments and the place from which each argues. Activism adds value to the University community by making understanding possible across differences but must be careful not to prevent us from listening to opponents and missing the point of tempering our arguments through debate. In tomorrow’s editorial, we will discuss the substantive question of mass incarceration, its racial overtones and the real concern of wrongful deaths in our own Durham jails.