Sunday, August 29, 2010

Stupid Chalk on Campus

Somebody chalked "Kappa Kappa Kappa: whites only" on the sidewalk near Lawson Hall last Thursday night. Stupid thing to do but I thought the response of Father Joseph Brown, director of the Arficana Studies department at SIUC, was a bit hyperbolic:

“We don’t know who put that on the ground … but all I know is if the public space makes me feel uncomfortable, that’s terrorism — I don’t know what other way to put it,” he said. “It’s anonymous, threatening behavior that tells me I’m not safe and should not be comfortable.”

If things that make you uncomfortable get called terrorism, then most of the internet ought to get classified as terrorist as there's plenty of things on there that disturb people, as Brown comments later in the article. Calling something like this "terrorism" inflates the importance of the chalk scrawl and lessens the impact of the word.

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