To the Editor:
I am writing to express my concern about the relationship between very real safety concerns and very real prejudice. In recent weeks our campus, like many communities across the country and world, has talked, worried, argued and strategized about how to respond to what feels to many of us like a new level of daily threat. How might we be or feel more safe and, at the same time, refuse to reinscribe old and lethal biases against those "others" who we believe have pierced the veil of the serenity and contentment many among us enjoy?
Recently I arrived at my office greeted by a colleague saying, "You better read 'The D.'" My heart sank, once again -- and only an hour or so before the new airline tragedy news came in -- as I read of the women who had been assaulted and the details of the attacks. I was immediately back in the grips of the very same questions. We know that sexual assaults occur on this campus, as on all campuses, with some frequency. We know that in most instances assailants are known to victims. What we may not like to know and may be reminded of now, I think, is a tendency to believe that the "outsider" (whether by virtue of racial identity or college non-affiliation or various other markers) -- the one not like "us" -- is more frighteningly responsible for such lapses in safety and for the sense of vulnerability these incidents bring home to some if not all of us.
The best friend, the guy down the hall, the brother (or sister sometimes) who breaches trust by sexually abusing creates abundant need for an ever-present safety alert among us. We certainly do need to identify criminals, and I have immense respect for campus and town officials responsible for investigating such incidents. At the same time, we need to be aware of the ways these assaults and what we know about them might feed into our tendency to imagine the criminal among us only as he or she who represents something "other" than what we used to call "the Dartmouth family." Rightly, I think, we tend not to rely on this turn of phrase as we enter a new century, knowing that it excludes as it includes. I hope that as we work together, sometimes with great conflict, to build moments and places of greater safety we will recognize, too, that every violation impedes our efforts and that age-old, dangerous biases can operate -- sometimes no matter how vigilant we attempt to be in other moments -- alongside reasonable anxieties about our safety and well-being.
