I'm Not Even Hungry

More Columbia Stuff

Because I'm thinking out loud for my column next semester, and by Saturday-ish I should be done, so shut up. Also...

Last summer, I was punched in the face for the first time, and I didn’t see it coming. Granted, the punch came from a fourteen year old who couldn’t have topped 5 and a half feet, so it was under the range of my vision. Luckily, the punch had strength proportionate to the kid’s height, so my pride suffered the most damage. That’s the good part about getting punched by a fourteen-year-old kid.
The bad part, of course, comes from having a fourteen-year-old kid want to punch you at all. Around ten o’clock at night, I was sitting around the sundial across from Low Library with three other Columbia students. Since I’m a gigantic nerd, I was in the middle of a conversation about different professors at Columbia and their work on race as a social construct. About five teenagers – one of whom would punch me in the face in a few minutes – came up to us while we were talking and began shouting obscenities at us. As anyone who has ever come into contact with one first hand can attest, the teenage boy may very well be the most obnoxious creature in the world, and these boys were living up to that reputation. They harassed all of us, but the one girl in our group received the brunt of their attention and comments, none of which I feel comfortable repeating in something my Mom could read. (On a related note, hi Mom!)
Assuming that they would go away if we ignored them long enough, we tried to act as if nothing had changed. Instead, the kids’ yells became louder and more aggressive. Eventually, one of us stood up to ask them to go. He became the center of attention, with all the kids circling around him. Even though I’m a pitiful weakling, the kid’s were too, so I got up to provide support. That’s when one of them punched me. He did it again, and again, and again. It didn’t hurt, I didn’t want to punch back, and I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything except look at the kid and see how much he hated me. Seeing that neither of us would respond, all of the kids left. None of this made for a particularly pleasant evening. This is what made a bad situation truly painful: all of the kids, but none of the Columbia students, were African American.
Being a stereotypical Ivy League, wannabe professor-in-training, the day after the confrontation, I walked to Labyrinth and went to the Cornel West entry in the African-American Studies section. West, formerly of Princeton, then Harvard, then Princeton again, although very controversial, is probably the most prominent African-American scholar in America today. In one of his books, Race Matters, I found what I was looking for – an explanation for why a fourteen year old would want to punch me, even before I had a chance to be a jerk to him.
West asserts that a kind of nihilism, although not one Nietzsche may have immediately recognized, dominates the lives of urban African-American poor. Although nihilism has always been a threat, West argues that, for a variety of reasons, it has gained a particular power in the last thirty years. In a telling example, he notes that whereas before the 1970s African Americans had the lowest suicide rate in America, in the past thirty years suicide among young African Americans has increased more than any other group. West attributes this to “a profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair,” which characterize a nihilism that comes from “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelesness.” This “breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others.” And leads to me getting punched in the face. More importantly, it could lead to the same thing happening to Columbia, at least metaphorically, in the near future.
The kids who came up to us were almost certainly from Morningside Heights, also known as the area that Columbia wants to take over so that it can build labs to study slime molds or something. If West is right and his understanding of nihilism is now the dominant attitude of African American urban life, then expansion may be even more difficult than Columbia has anticipated. Convincing people to leave their homes is difficult; convincing them to overcome an overpowering, nihilistic rage so that financial discussions can even began is probably harder. And my finely honed intuition tells me that Lee Bollinger and Robert Kasdan, the man in charge of the expansion project, have more experience with the former than the latter.
Even if Columbia convinces the government to use eminent domain to seize private property, widespread nihilism could make their victory pyrrhic. The next time racial tensions climb to a fevered pitch in New York, Columbia could very likely become target. Nobody can predict what people who continue to live mostly out of habit would do in a situation like that, but the results could be a lot worse than a punch in the face.

posted by Tim @ 7:31 PM