Page 12 - The NOISE November 2015

what if thousands of people marched every time there was a tragedy?
during the last decade, the paper you hold in your hands has covered vigils, marches, and rallies on Northern Arizona University’s campus related to sexual assault and rape, uranium mining on the Navajo Nation, coal mining on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, US imperialism abroad, the militarization of the border at home, sweatshop labor, animal rights, police violence, and the protection of the San Francisco Peaks from being sprayed with the City’s reclaimed wastewater. To witness thousands of people — students, faculty, and community members — marching in honor of NAU’s shooting victims was nothing short of inspiring. Yet, for many people, the overwhelming response was bittersweet, and highlighted the uncomfortable truth that some lives seem to matter more than others, that some forms of violence seem to provoke more outrage than others.
Under the assumption that a bit of distance from a tragedy can offer some much needed clarity, this article is an attempt to push the conversation a little deeper, beyond gun control laws, mental illness scapegoating, and second amendment rights. This is not to say that those conversations are not important, certainly they are. However, they prevent us from asking difficult questions about ourselves in the wake of tragedy. While this is certainly difficult to broach, this article assumes that readers are complex enough to mourn for the terrible and unnecessary loss of life, and at the same time capable of reflecting on the inconsistency of grief.
Flagstaff woke up on October 9 to the harrowing news that 18-year-old Northern Arizona University student Steven Jones shot four other students on campus, killing one of them. The shooting reportedly stemmed from an altercation involving two groups of men that started at an off-campus party.
On the same day as the shooting at NAU, President Barak Obama arrived in Oregon to address the grieving students and faculty members of Umpqua Community College, where an unprovoked gunman opened fire in a classroom, during school hours, killing 10 people and injuring 9 others a week earlier. Those murdered in Oregon were students and faculty, ranging in age from 19 to 67, and included a woman in a wheelchair. Given the fact that the shooter had written a letter, giving it to a potential victim to give to the police in exchange for his life, it’s clear that the shooting in Oregon was a planned attack. It was referred to by CNN as a “deadly rampage,” a “campus massacre,” and the local paper reported that students in other classrooms, hid in the dark in terror as they listened to fellow students and faculty members begging for their lives.
This is obviously not what happened at NAU, as much as the media would have us believe otherwise. HuffingtonPostnotedtheincidentasthe“secondschoolshootingthismonth,”the Arizona Daily Sun ran a headline, “NAU Campus Shooter Kills One, Wounds Three.” Yes, several people were shot, which makes it a mass shooting. And it did technically take place on campus; so the term “mass school shooting,” is not entirely inappropriate. Within a day of the incident, NAU police officer Christopher Anderson was clear when he said this was “very different than the Oregon situation. It appears this was not a targeting of campus.” An NAU faculty member, who wished to remain anonymous said, “it’s pretty insulting, I think, to the victims in Oregon that their experience is being compared to NAU, where some people were shot because of a fight in a parking lot that happened to be on campus.”
ThePhoenixNewTimesdrewheavilyfromsocialmedia,wherethedebatewentbackandforth over the question of whether this “counted” as a school shooting. Dr. Charles Katz, Arizona State University professor for the Center of Violence Prevention was quoted, “’Somebody died; how does it not count? It certainly counts for the person who died and for their family. It occurred on campus, so it’s a school shooting,’” he said. At the same time Mr. Katz noted that it was an example of a “’typical homicide,’” where “a fight breaks out, someone pulls a gun, and people get shot.” Perhaps the difference doesn’t even matter. After all, “it was still a shooting,” noted one Facebook user featured in the Phoenix New Times article.
NAU mobilized thousands of people from campus and the community to participate in a “Unity Walk,” led by university president Rita Cheng and Flagstaff Mayor Jerry Nabours. #NAUStrong was transformed from its use and association with NAU athletics to a slogan of unity across campus in support of the victims. #PrayforNAU was another Twitter hashtag that also saturated the response. As I type this, the university is printing up even more #NAUStrong banners.
Pausing to acknowledge the unprecedented response to this tragedy forces us to reflect on the tens of thousands of tragedies that go virtually unrecognized. Flagstaff peace activist and former NAU lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies, Barb White noted, “it is crucial to put this shooting into context, acknowledging how some violence is given more attention and other acts of violence are barely noted in the press, but all acts of violence damage our capacity to find peace or justice.” Similarly, another NAU professor who asked to remain anonymous felt conflicted by the response. “I have mixed feelings about this because I am sitting here
story and photo by kyle boggs
wondering how to grieve when some lives that are lost seem to register as mattering more than others,” they said.
Roughly 30,000 people are shot to death every year in the United States. This fact was not lost on EJ Montini, who penned an op-ed for the Arizona Republic titled, “NAU Shows Some Victims Worth More Than Others.” He wrote, “A majority of gun violence involves young men killingyoungmen,aswasthecaseatNAU. Thatisnotunusual,”hesaid. “Thathappensonthe streets of Phoenix and on the streets of every American big city just about every day.”
Mr. Montini started this column with the question, “Are college kids worth more than street kids?” Of course, “street kids” is sort of a silly category that erases the social positions of those most vulnerable to violence, including gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, people of color, and homeless people. Dr. Arianna Burford, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at NAU thought of Keisha Jenkins. “Here you have a prominent black trans woman murdered in Philadelphia during the same week as the shooting at NAU, and virtually nobody talking about it.” Cherno Biko, a close friend of Ms. Jenkins teared up on camera as she expressed fear that she would “be next.” Dr. Burford noted that many of their students were surprised that nobody was talking about issues of whiteness and masculinity.
When the Arizona Daily Sun ran a photo, capturing the sea of people marching in support of the victims at NAU, the caption read, “Several thousand people participated in a walk through the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to honor the victims of Friday’s deadly shooting.”
Imagine, for a moment, if the caption were different.
Several thousand people participated in a walk through the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to honor the victims of sexual assault.
Or
Several thousand people participated in a walk through the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to honor the victims of nuclear colonialism in Northern Arizona.
Or
Several thousand people participated in a walk through the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to honor the victims of now it’s your turn to fill in the blank.
NAU students, faculty, and Flagstaff community members demonstrated that they have the empathy, compassion, and indeed the unity to carry this momentum to honor every victim of violence, not just the white ones, not just college students, and not just those who die on campus, and not just those who are shot by a gun. Contrary to other marches on campus, NAU’s Unity March lacked direction. It’s easy to march, especially when classes are canceled, and the university prints up signs for you. Though many in number, marchers chatted with friends, others looked down, fidgeting with their phones. Many walked slowly, somberly, almost aimlessly wearing blue and gold. It was hard to tell exactly what participants were
“unified” around, or against, or for what?
What if they marched for teenager Kyle Garcia, who was shot and killed by a Flagstaff police
officer in 2006? What if thousands gathered last march, the morning they found Kenneth Yazziefrozentodeath,facedowninthesnow? Lastyear,twoteenagers—SamuelEvansand Rafael Mongini — committed suicide in separate instances by lying across the train tracks. Just a week prior to the NAU shooting, the bodies of NAU student Ashley Darby and her partner Jeriah Hildwine were found in the woods, an apparent suicide. Following Dr. Katz’s comments, surely these deaths “count” as well, for the people that knew and loved them. Yet in all these cases, the silence was deafening.
In the wake of the tragedy at NAU, the response has indicated that there is untapped, misdirected, and problematically appropriated potential for students, faculty, and community members to make larger their circle of empathy to include all victims of violence. Ms. White reminds us that there are “millions who have had their lives ripped apart by trauma.” Not just gun violence, but institutional violence takes on many forms. After all, when a man freezes to death on the streets of an affluent city like Flagstaff because he doesn’t have a house to go to, that’s pretty violent. When a woman is sexually assaulted by an acquaintance on campus and finds no justice, that’s violent too. When native communities are slowly poisoned to death because a mining company never bothered to clean up their mess, this is also violent. “We have to focus on the root causes of violence and oppression in this country, not on the red herring of gun control,” said Ms. White. “We are avoiding the hardest conversations, the only discussions that will actually make a difference.”
| Kyle Boggs is taking the conversation deeper. news@thenoise.us newsfeature
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