As a thriving, cash-poor immigrant woman of color who is first and foremost a survivor of sexual assault, I am outraged for the young woman who is the latest (but not the last) victim of Dartmouth’s fraternity rape culture. With as many survivors as we have on this campus, why is there no fury, no strike, nothing burning, nothing occupied? This week alone, I’ve learned of two other women who have been assaulted by men in fraternities. And still, students are not expressing enough outrage.
I emphasize the “fraternities” because they serve as the seat of power in Dartmouth’s limited social and geographical landscape. They furnish all men on this campus with disproportionate power, and as such, I refuse to extricate them from responsibility for any incident of sexual assault, wherever it may occur. In this world where the powerful protect the powerful, I believe the administration relies on the Greek system as a mechanism of social stratification and control about as much as the Greek system relies on the administration for protection.
To be clear, a young man felt empowered to not only stalk and rape a young woman but to post a “how-to” guide for other rapists on a community forum. He felt empowered to act with impunity. This is not a matter of “boys behaving badly.” This is a matter of grotesque, systematic violence against our most vulnerable and a reflection of who we are when no one is looking. Whatever we pretend to be — loving, welcoming, kind — this incident and our lukewarm response to it show that we are not. We are apathetic, listless, anxious, depressed and eating each other alive. Now that we have been stripped of pretense, now that the world has seen us as we are, now that the ghosts have come climbing out of closets, now more than ever, is the time to demand a Dartmouth free of interpersonal and structural violence against workers, the cash poor, women, people of color and queer folk.
Had Dartmouth chosen the difficult job of prosecuting repeat rapists instead of orchestrating show trials that humiliate victims and allow offenders to continue to offend, we would not live in a world where, according to a White House report, one out of every five female students is sexually assaulted during their time in college. Sexual assault is not a hazard of living; it is a tool of terror critical to power maintenance. When the administration refuses to substantially address the systemic nature of sexual assault, racism and queer antagonism at the root of our Dartmouth experience, it does so not out of powerlessness, but out of blatant self-interest.
It does so because it cannot bear to look into its own soul and find nothing there. It does so with the knowledge that its own hands are bloodied red: that women, queer folk and people of color, especially indigenous people, have been fleeing in large numbers for as long as anyone can remember. The Dartmouth administration, or Delta Alpha Useless, is mostly a collection of rich white men and their allies who have no incentive, economic or otherwise, to ensure the academic success and bodily safety of our community’s most vulnerable. There can be no community or justice until the administration stops using our pain as a public relations platform upon which to further its aims as a corporation.
As students who pay money to be educated — not assaulted, harassed and silenced — we must mobilize and refuse to be placated with dialogue, sanitized letters and the creation of new centers and job titles that only further the charade of this “community.” What we need now is moral leadership from the adults who have been entrusted with our lives, safety and health. They need to take a stand and protect the poor, the queer, the black and brown and perennially politically disenfranchised. No new center for community action, no new initiative, no new committee will suffice where we lack integrity and moral fortitude. Beyond all else, what we need now is each other — an angry contingent of fed-up change agents demanding a just, more loving Dartmouth through positive and vigorous action. When the mechanisms of justice are used to further injustice and silence dissent, then it is time to do away with the mechanisms of old and build anew. If we want better for ourselves and our community, we are going to have to build a broad, coalitional movement for transformative justice on this campus.
Sadia Hassan '13 is a guest columnist.
