Last night’s event was in part intended to promote Rise Up October, an event later this month

Last night, The Stop Mass Incarceration Network hosted a panel about police brutality, featuring Cornel West. We sent Bwogger Sarah Dahl to check out the event and report back on the discussion.

Last night in Roone Auditorium, despite resistance from the University in securing a location, Columbia students and The Stop Mass Incarceration Network hosted a panel of speakers condemning police terror. The panel included some big names: philosopher and Union Theological professor Cornel West; Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler; writer, Columbia film professor, and former Black Panther Jamal Joseph; Revolutionary Communist Party USA founder Carl Dix; Columbia Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw; and activist Nicholas Heyward Sr., whose son was unlawfully shot by an New York police officer in 1994.

Though finalization of a location came less than 24 hours before the the event, the auditorium was full with students from across the city. During the day before the panel, student activists used their voices and flyers to announce the talk on College Walk and Low Steps. In addition, 3,000 people were invited to the event on Facebook.

The turnout to the panel was well-deserved. Each of the panelists delivered powerful speeches, using personal stories, history, facts, and emotion, to ask why police terror is so prevalent, and demanding that we fight for change.

“Columbia University used to be the place,” Jamal Joseph announced. “Whenever something happened in the 60’s, Columbia students shut it down, and opened it up. Alma Mater was blindfolded with a North Vietnamese flag.”

Joseph was referencing some of the activism that occurred on campus in the 1960s, in particular, the 1968 weeklong occupation of campus buildings that called for the university to halt Vietnam War research and construction of a gym in Morningside Park—demands which were met.

Eve Ensler shared the story of Natasha McKenna, an inmate at a Virginia prison who died at the hands of her jailers.

“We live in a state of terror that is undermining the lives of black women and men,” she declared, then quoted Natasha McKenna’s captors: “don’t resist.”

“What does that mean, don’t resist?” Ensler demanded. “Love your subjugation, your degradation?”

Nicholas Heyward Sr. followed with a personal story of violence. His 13 year old son was shot by a cop 21 years ago, and he has been “battling for justice” ever since.

“No one could have told me I’d be out here this long,” he said. He spoke movingly about his son, whose death resembles that of Tamir Rice: another young boy shot by police while playing with a toy gun.

Panelist Eve Ensler cried during Heyward’s story, and hugged him after he finished.

Kimberlé Crenshaw discussed the struggles of black women in particular, and the many police murders of black women which go unreported by the media, and thus, unnoticed by the public. Crenshaw called on the audience to “Say Her Name,” citing the deaths of Melissa Williams, Kayla Moore, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson.

“How are we going to have a movement when we don’t know their names, or their narratives?” Crenshaw asked.

Crenshaw and Ensler also both commented on the need for the feminism community to recognize police brutality as a feminist issue.

Carl Dix, a founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration Project, called on the audience for change.

“These are not isolated incidents,” he began. “It’s gonna take revolution, nothing less [to change the system]. There is a movement, and people will fight with you,” he continued. “You gotta be in the streets with us.”

Cornel West ended the panel with a powerful tone, turning the discussion back to its audience: Columbia, and the role students can play in the fight against police violence.

“Universities generate a culture of being smart,” he said. “Don’t tell me how smart you are: you be wise, courageous, rise up. Columbia University, I thought you were committed to the truth—if you aren’t, you aren’t serious about education.”

West also raised the issue of socioeconomics.

“It is different for the black upper class. Poor blacks are criminalized. To the middle class black students here: don’t get so mis-educated you lose sight of what’s going on.”

To end of the night, the panelists held a Q&A.. One Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) student asked the audience: “You guys don’t stand up in your classrooms and call shit out; how complicit are you going to be? What are you going to do to eradicate white supremacy?”

She mentioned that she is applying to Columbia, and everyone she speaks to tells her it is the greatest place in the world—but she wants to know why. This was something no one could answer, but an important issue for some of the more privileged audience members to consider.

Another audience member brought up presidential candidate Bernie Sanders—a beacon of hope for many who distrust politicians. Yet even Sanders has failed to fully embrace the police brutality movement.

“Bernie leans in the right direction, but we need to put pressure on him,” West said.

Ensler remarked: “Ally up. White people need to learn when to shut up.”

A final guest highlighted the university’s $6 billion expansion into Harlem by noting “people, business, and churches have been displaced.
One might wonder—where are today’s Columbia students protesting this new wave of gentrification? (Also,where did the small army of passionate Putin supporters come from last week?)

In 2015, so many of us roll our eyes and brush past the few courageous police brutality activists who have handed out flyers and shouted chants. We are too consumed with our LitHum reading to care. Instead, we should remember the energy that filled protesters of the past, and emulate them.

Rise Up October via the official website