Hello.
This Wespeak is for the general Wesleyan community, but more specifically for those people who upon reading the manifesto by the University Liberation Front (ULF) grew indignant.
Firstly, I want to clarify that the nascent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which I am a member of, did not surreptitiously send out such a statement. I would know because I, along with a couple other people, behind SDS’s back, behind everyone’s back, all by ourselves, created this damned ULF and its manifesto and blithely put it onto this campus.
I am so sorry.
Days after, I thankfully stumbled into an assortment of conversations among friends and peers. And I became really estranged from my own views and actions. I’ve had a transformative weekend and this is a confessional of sorts, a disavowal, an apology, a realization.
There were people aggravated whom I did not talk to about this; that, in addition to the pertinent fact that this Wespeak is from the mind of a white moneyed male, will seriously hamper my understanding: but I’ve been trying to soak in what people spoke of and to imagine it and yes, this is what I now (didn’t I always know this, though?!) feel and believe:
The idea that I, along with a couple others, would liberate this campus is a bad burden.
The salient disconnect between our ideas and our actual actions in our lived experiences is infuriating. Anonymity in this case bolstered privilege. Numerous highfalutin ideas expressed in single sentences makes an ass of the abstract. Plainly juxtaposing boredom and colonialism, ubiquitous squares and prisons, sexualized trees and raped women and slaves, the writer of children’s science-fiction and bell hooks, produces an equality of them all and deflates, flattens, and mocks the urgent juggernauts that are immeasurably roaring through people’s worlds and identities.
As I reread this I am so ashamed that I helped publicize this conceit and am disturbed that no alarm clanged in me when: I thought what I was doing was having some fun, assumed I was provoking Wesleyan, believed I was putting out a handful of sweet ideas in a silly non-logical radical document, and found it a bit exhilarating to write anything that had come to surface. And thus I had forgotten a lot and barfed on the campus.
This came about because I just so badly wanted to do something, but really didn’t know what or how.
I appropriated the names and workings of profound queer, black, and Chicana writers and agitators, Black Panthers, Native American leaders, Transcendentalists, Jewish and Spanish anarchists, a militant abolitionist…
We simply rejected all political parties, all movements of thought, all institutions of academia, all forms related to cities, and all countries, carelessly forgetting much: for example how anti-colonial movements are tied into nationalist movements. And who are we to think we have such an ability to independently self-actualize and float above thousands of intertwined organizations, institutions, communities, and thoughts and be unaffected by them? These are our lives, but we normalized ourselves (even more than already) and so declaimed that we were immune to the wise insights of deconstruction.
We stated what would be effective and real radical activism. We framed it and re-stereotyped it; we sliced it from experiences and emotions. We couched destruction in fun. We commoditized our subjects for willy-nilly consumerism by writing them short, snappy, and squished, offending each other and the reader.
This ominous manifesto was laughable in its pretenses, did not explain itself and was confusing, and worst, it antagonized people. It was another drop of water upon the already actively eroded activism at Wesleyan, a milieu cracked along so many boundaries such as white presumptuous advocacy vis-à-vis the activism of people of color and the individual groups therein. And these are not hermetic communities–there’s crossing in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people and I have become a serious believer that in a capitalist culture that relies on and actualizes alienation, a radical endeavor is to forge communities. And so I do not like that the University Liberation Front and its manifesto was another wedge.
I hope this Wespeak gives some redress to the chagrined people who could do a more deep critique of the manifesto than I did. And I repeat, since I know the association is out there, SDS did not advance this manifesto and was, as I soon found out, just as disturbed as others by it. Please forgive me and the people I did this with … and my goddess, I hope this mistake does not block up working relationships.
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