Let The Man Speak! What America Can Learn From Goddard College s Controversial Choice of Mumia Abu-Jamal as Commencement Speaker

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1 Let The Man Speak! What America Can Learn From Goddard College s Controversial Choice of Mumia Abu-Jamal as Commencement Speaker Since Goddard College announced convicted cop killer Mumia Abu- Jamal will deliver the commencement address at a graduation ceremony Sunday, the Internet has been awash with one-sided articles and invective aimed at the institution, its alumni, and the graduating students who chose to invite Abu-Jamal as their commencement speaker. United States Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa) even asked the school to rescind its invitation to the convicted felon. People are shocked and appalled. They shouldn t be. Toomey and those who stand with him want to silence a man who, regardless of his innocence or guilt, is a bonafide scholar, a man whose words are of genuine intellectual and academic interest, who s written four books on varying subjects and published an essay in the Yale Law Journal, who s been invited to contribute to NPR s All Things Considered

2 and who s contributed hundreds of broadcasts to Democracy Now! over a prison telephone, who s won awards for his reporting of conditions on death row and first hand accounts of his experience in the American criminal justice and penal systems, who has much to contribute to conversations about race and justice and capital punishment; a man, like it or not, still entitled to freedom of speech. So far, the national conversation taking place in the media has failed to adequately tease out the complex and complicated issues surrounding the controversy (surprised?). Please, allow me: In 1982, Abu-Jamal was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. After a lengthy appeals process and twenty-nine years on death row, his sentence was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole in Faulkner s widow, Maureen, has called the students choice to have Abu- Jamal speak a disgrace, saying It seems like our justice system allows murderers to continue to have a voice over the public airwaves and at college commencement. It s despicable. President of the Vermont State Troopers Association Michael O Neil said, Your invitation to this convicted murderer demonstrates an absolute disregard for the family of Danny Faulkner and the families of other police officers who have been killed while serving their communities.

3 In a statement of support to CNN, Goddard College defended its graduating students decision to invite Abu-Jamal: Every individual has an inherent worth and dignity and deserves to have their perspective heard even if it is unpopular. There is academic merit in what Mumia has to say and it is important that we at Goddard College support freedom of speech and our students right to choose. They are adults making their own decisions, Samantha Kolber, the school s Communications Director, told CNN. Quoting an from a student, Kolber said Abu-Jamal s case has been rooted in the struggles for freedom of mind, body, and spirit which are values that are important to these graduates. But the widow Faulkner protests. He stepped out of society when he put a bullet between my husband s eyes. Just as he took my husband s freedom and life, he lost his rights. Why does he have constitutional rights? My husband doesn t have any. He is 6 feet underground. Nationwide there has been surprise and outrage that a man found guilty of murdering a police officer was invited by students to speak. Browse #GoddardCollege or #CopKiller on Twitter and you ll find angry Internet commenters who share Faulkner s point of view saying they will never employ Goddard alumni.

4 Incensed people writing hateful posts have flooded the colleges Facebook page with hopes its students are raped and killed, that when they need the police, none will show up, that they will endure physical violence. They ve threatened to carry out the violence themselves. Apart from the usual and seemingly ubiquitous world-wide-web-whitenoise of second amendment gun-nuts with red or right in their screen name posting what one can only hope are jokes about actually leaving their house to show up and exercise their second amendment rights one commenter on a Fox News article identified President Obama, Abu- Jamal, and Goddard students as reasons to have and exercise said rights the school has also purportedly received bomb threats and those who have defended the school on social media, including Kolber, have received death threats. * One of the most popular digs with the trolls besides the hippie and commie cracks, the left and liberal jabs (Had you heard the pejorative lib-tard before? ), besides jokes that Goddard degrees are now worthless, criticisms of the schools low-residency, self-directed model, besides what seems to be a general consensus that graduates probably won t go on to be upstanding citizens who make any real contributions to society (the school has many notable Alumni, by the by, most of whom are artists: Trey Anastasio of the rock band Fish, Jonathan Katz of cartoon comedy Dr. Katz, the actor William H. Macy, the writers Piers Anthony, Mark Doty, Mary Karr, David Mamet, and Matthew Quick to

5 name some of the most well-known) besides all those, the most popular dig with the trolls is Goddard s 100% acceptance rate. A 100% acceptance rate? Ha! What a crock! A college that will take absolutely anyone obviously isn t offering a real education. But that s what Goddard does. Goddard accepts everyone. Even cop killers. I write of Goddard s ethos of radical acceptance from experience. * After graduating magna cum laude from Emerson College, I chose to pursue an MFA at Goddard rather than the pedigree of a more prestigious and competitive program because I was concerned with having a supportive environment while I wrote the difficult book that would be my thesis a memoir about my incarceration as a teenager in a place called Paradise Cove in Upolu, Western Samoa, a part of the Troubled Teen Industry, a billion dollar network of privatized prison camps for kids (You can outsource your child abuse now!). I was thirteen when I was kidnapped and institutionalized. I had committed no crime other than being too independent and unruly I listened to rock music, wore black, and talked back; in other words, I was a teenager for my conservative Catholic mother. There was no appeals

6 process. I spent two years in residential treatment program rife with abuse and neglect where being hog-tied with your hands and feet behind your back and left in box for a few days was a standard form of punishment. I know about being imprisoned. I know about injustice. And while I wrote about it, I experienced overwhelming depression and anxiety. I also experienced a more supportive community than I d thought it possible to find in this life. Besides finding the program academically rigorous, I found Goddard to be the single most diverse, accepting, and nurturing club ever to have me as a member. My cohort comprises every conceivable race, gender, sexuality, and includes the differently abled. They even ask your preferred gender pro-noun on housing forms. And they accepted me. And I thrived. Goddard accepts everyone. * And too, Mumia Abu-Jamal is himself among Goddard s notable alumni! He attended the college s campus in Plainfield, Vermont in the 70 s and subsequently went on to earn a Bachelor s degree from the institution in 96 while in prison for the murder of Danny Faulkner, whom he allegedly shot in the back four times before pulling the trigger a fifth and final time, putting a bullet in Faulkner s forehead.

7 And Abu-Jamal delivering a commencement speech Sunday (via prerecorded phone call) is completely in keeping with Goddard s ethos of radical acceptance. Abu-Jamal s case was and is complex and complicated. There is overwhelming evidence for his guilt (he was found at the scene with a gun containing 5 spent cartridges and multiple witnesses testified they saw him murder Faulkner) and there are elaborate counter-arguments that he was framed and his trial was unfair arguments compelling enough that Abu-Jamal has remained a controversial figure for over thirty years who s had numerous human rights advocacy organizations express concerns about the fairness of his trial and sentencing and who s been the subject two documentaries. Abu-Jamal has also been the focus of both the FBI s COINTELPRO surveillance program and a decades long, high profile international campaign to free him. He is a controversial but indisputably significant historical and political figure. And yes, Abu-Jamal was a member of the Black Panthers but why does that keep getting brought up like it s a bad thing? The organization was at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Yes, they had members who were militant, but instead of condemning them perhaps it s time America examined its past with more understanding and compassion for why militancy may have seemed an appropriate response to the oppression of every day life for some African Americans in that era. And lo, as a Black panther, Abu-Jamal took on a role of writing information and communication. He was also a reporter and a radio journalist who interviewed the likes of Bob Marley and Alex Haley,

8 author of roots. He was a megaphone for the movement, a man who earned the moniker A Voice for the Voiceless. Efforts like those of the Innocence Project a national non-profit litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice, according to their website demonstrate over and over there is a distinction between conviction and guilt and America s justice is often unreliable. But Abu-Jamal s pre-conviction character and his innocence or guilt are irrelevant. This is about him having a voice now. It is about acknowledging that what he has to say is of academic merit and interest. It is about keeping the Thought Police out of the hallowed halls of higher education. The discussion should not be about whether Abu-Jamal has a right to speak or whether his voice matters his right is constitutionally protected and his voice firmly established. The conversation should be about why people are so intensely bothered by this man being honored.

9 That s right: the outrage is not because he s speaking he speaks all the time on radio broadcasts it s because commencement speaker is a position of honor (typically given, along with an honorary degree, to someone who deserves neither!). Abu-Jamal being honored offends a black and white sense of justice. The difference between right and righteous. Even if Abu-Jamal is guilty, him speaking him being honored can still bejust, not in the sense of personal accountability, but in attempting to balance the larger narrative of a nation at war with itself wherein an entire population has been disenfranchised from its own political efficacy by the New Jim Crowism of America s racially biased and for-profit penal system. This is about how a demographic socially and politically silenced by incarceration in an obviously unfair arrangement 12% of the country s population, 40% of its prisoners deserves to be heard. Violence begets violence, cop killer, killer cops, chicken and egg culture of rage, if you think you re outraged at the injustice imagine how they feel. This is about how it is time for America to acknowledge the wounds of racism have not healed over but are festering underneath the scabs it s been picking, to assent that the abscess must be lanced and drained by the scalpel of contrition, cleaned and dressed with the poultice of healthy dialogue, before the infection spreads to the blood and the nation goes

10 septic, becomes toxic to itself, or the abscess pops in painful protest, revolution. In a post-ferguson America, each day I cover another cell phone video of an unarmed black person being beaten, brutalized, detained, tasered, shot, orchoked to death by a law enforcement officer, it becomes increasingly apparent why we need voices like Abu-Jamal s, it becomes clear why these are exactly the sorts of stories America needs right now, why it is a brave and thoughtful intellectual and academic endeavor for students of a school historically interested in social justice and marginalized voices to invite this man to speak at their commencement. It is time to acknowledge that there is a second civil war going on in America. And call for peace talks. * Who will Abu-Jamal s speech harm? We will release it after the students hear it. It s a reflection of his experience on campus at Goddard. He went to Goddard in the late 70s as an undergraduate. He talks about being able to experience an intellectual life, Director of PrisonRadio.org Noelle Hanrahan told CNN of Abu-Jamal s address, which her organization recorded over the telephone.

11 The speech will surely will offend those who cling to a binary understanding of justice, but this is a good thing, because now we re having this talk. And the fact that it is happening at all will undoubtedly cause understandable pain to Faulkner s widow and others who cared for him. Indeed, anyone who s lost a loved one to violence, especially one who chose to serve as an officer of the law, may be understandably distressed, particularly if they lack context. And this is the most regrettable part about having these difficult conversations: they are painful. They ask us to confront assumptions and opinions steeped in powerful emotions and personal narrative. And this hurts. But still, the answer is: no one. Abu-Jamal delivering a commencement speech may hurt some, but it will harm no one. Yet ignorant and enraged masses galvanized by sensational headlines and irresponsibly simplistic articles which, typical of the reductive tendency of modern media, fail to address the ambiguity or complexity of the matter (The Braindead Megaphone anyone?) are verbally abusing the college, it s alumni, and the graduating class, threatening them with physical harm, which I take personally. *

12 Too, I write of how the dialogue around this topic is affecting the graduates from experience. My significant other is graduating Sunday after struggling with a learning disability through seven years and five institutions of higher education. A brilliant artist and writer I envy her work her disability prevented her from thriving at other institutions. Goddard accepted her. Goddard accepts everyone. She didn t personally participate in the decision to invite Abu-Jamal and I ve witnessed her complex reaction vacillating between shame, fear, and defiant pride to the controversy surrounding a ceremony she expected to be an intimate celebration of her hard-won academic achievement. She s scared to go to her own graduation tomorrow. Instead of eager anticipation, she s been filled with anxiety, obsessively reading vicious and vile comments, terrified someone is going to target the ceremony with violence to make a misguided point about justice. And I could say something about how two wrongs don t make a right, but that s just a saying. Like do unto others. * In response to an inflammatory post in a Goddard Facebook group demanding to know the reason Abu-Jamal had been invited to address students, Darrah Cloud, one of my old advisors, wrote: The furor over the impending commencement speech by a former Black Panther is such

13 a learning experience for our students. And learning is a life-long habit we attempt to instill, no matter how painful what we discover. What can America learn from this attitude toward learning and Goddard s brazen decline to disinvite Sunday s controversial commencement speaker? Maybe this obscure little school handing out degrees to anyone who pays the price of admission with its radical policies of accepting everyone and advocating for complex dialogue around complicated issues can help America edge toward a more nuanced, tolerant and even-minded discourse around race and (in)justice one that condemns responding to violence with violence and not only embraces but encourages all the attendant ambiguity and ambivalence that accompanies conversations about difficult things. Let the man speak! Update: Mumia Abu-Jamal s address makes me proud to be a Goddardite. JC Sevcik is an alumus of Emerson and Goddard Colleges covering US News with a focus on Social Justice for United Press International. He recently completed his first book, a memoir about his experience in the Troubled Teen Industry.