Stand With Us: my memory and regret

I was a leader in the Williams "Stand With Us" movement, which seemed to be a coalescing of opinions and feelings that had been long-felt but not acted upon. The group formed at Williams in the February of my freshman year, and successfully put on a rally/march + a day called "Claiming Williams" the next year. I was a leader of the third subgroup of SwU, which unsuccessfully sought to create student-generated community standards instead of relying on the Dean's Office for those rules. However, fears about thought crime and harsh punishments for un-PC speech stifled my groups efforts, which taught me a huge deal about leadership and communication.

The events were catalyzed by what was written on the door of a frosh in Willy E, next door, but were much more tied to long-standing patterns and emotions that provided the impetus for the organization. One of Stand With Us's biggest issues, as I saw it, was that the larger campus never heard much (or realized much) about the long-standing emotions, and only saw a bunch of students and faculty getting riled up about a word written by some drunk dude on a door.

So from the start, Stand With Us was understood very differently by those inside and outside of it. The meeting that established the shared feelings of those within the movement was on a Wednesday night. I had conflicts, but ultimately chose not to go because I didn't think much would come of the meeting. Instead, I heard the next day that students had talked and shared for over three hours about their pain and feelings about how this college treated some of them as second-class, in a way. These feelings were sometimes caused subtlety - a look of suspension, a dismissive comment, or a bothersome policy for financial aid kids, but also had occasional and rare explicit causes: words shouted in a dining hall, graffiti on a door, and other thing documented by the MCC.

That first meeting was more than enough to establish intra-group legitimacy: there was never a question after that that Stand With Us wasn't responding to a real, tangible problem affecting many students. The problem was that that legitimacy didn't extend to outside of the group, and to an extent, didn't a extend to me. I saw first hand the passion of so many student leaders, and I knew that whatever was causing them to act, their feelings weren't shallow or opportunistic - this was a real passion.

The problem was that after that first meeting, there really wasn't much said about what had caused those feelings. I spent hours on WSO arguing for Stand With Us on faith - faith that these feelings had real causes based in our dynamics on campus, even though I didn't see the causes for such frustration for myself. I heard a few things, sure, about a time when some Ephs crossed the street to avoid walking by another student wearing "gangster" clothing, but nothing that really justified what was going on around me. Yet, I knew it was justified, and treated it as such. And through all of the Stand With Us saga, continued to assume the justification. I don't think I ever really understood all of the causes for the feelings and emotions. Perhaps that was impossible.

But Stand With Us acted as if it was easy - as if anyone with a modestly functioning brain could see a culture of "hatred and indifference," and that those who didn't were negligently ignorant as "indifferent." That turned a lot of people off, and was part of a "with us or against us" dynamic that caused me to choose not to follow the march. After it, students spoke to me about how uncomfortable they had felt as marchers came into their common rooms and study spaces, inviting them to make a statement they couldn't identify with, but with an implicit judgment on those who were "indifferent." People don't like being identified as bad, and reacted defensively, turning what should have been a universal stance against bigotry into a divisive campus issue with two sides arguing over WSO and dinner tables alike.

Even worse, some reacted by saying that the feelings and emotions of SwU members were flawed or false, an attack on validity that caused more heightened emotions as people felt attacked for an emotion they didn't want to have in the first place. SwU members were described as "looking for a battlefield" and choosing Williams to fight national issues that supposedly weren't present here. In focusing on the overreaction's illegitimacy, many forgot that there had to be some reason, somewhere, for so many to care so much. But there wasn't a lot of talking about this - just an assumption on one side that the justifications were obvious and on the other that they were invented.

And so the fracture continued, and never healed. Those of both perspectives continue to this day, I think, with the same feelings on the group and what it did, and I find that to be unfortunate. Stand With Us was a huge learning opportunity - I found out how much names matter in defining what a policy proposal is - but we squandered this chance to understand each other, and instead assumed that those with opposite opinions were deficient. I don't know how I could have fixed this, or even if it should or could have been fixed by me, but I do regret it deeply.