Graeme Phillip Harris is in trouble.
Harris is one of three white men under investigation for last February’s Sunday night desecration of the statue of James Meredith, part of a monument commemorating the university’s 1962 integration. The statue was discovered that morning with a noose looped around its neck, and a Georgia flag with Confederate emblems, carefully folded, flowing down its back like a cape. A witness would later report hearing two of the men under investigation for the incident wandering near the statue shouting “white power” and “f-cking n-ggers.”
Harris, for his alleged involvement with the incident, was expelled from his fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon and has left The University of Mississippi. Harris has pleaded not guilty to the charges, with his lawyer claiming that Harris himself did not tie the the noose around the statue’s neck and that the other two men involved might have received “federal forgiveness” for their complicity in the incident. If convicted, Harris potentially faces 11 years in prison for federal civil rights charges.
Life comes at you fast.
But for many, life hasn’t come for Harris fast enough. His and his yet unnamed accomplices’ alleged actions injected terror and intimidation into the hearts of a student minority community whose campus should not have been fashioned into a sundown town where unwitting blacks would be wise to make themselves scarce once dark came.
The statue ensnared with the noose and the flag represented the deliberate intention of inflicting the type of emotional violence that made me sick with apprehension wondering, that following morning, what would have happened if a black body made of flesh instead of bronze had crossed their paths in those fateful hours.
The possibility of punishment for Harris and the other men involved hopefully represents a trend in enforcing punishment for the type of behavior enabled by the entitlement to space that accompanies white male privilege. Any act that threatens a fellow student’s feeling of safety on campus is impermissible, and, contrary to popular belief, these are not isolated events. Though on that night, three young men were stupid enough to allow the deficiencies in their upbringing to walk them outside and vandalize a statue, their acts and the sentiments behind them were hardly wholly condemned.
Even some of those able to see the atrocity of the statue vandalism spoke out against attempts by Chancellor Dan Jones to change the culture of campus space to a more inclusive environment, one where the urge to commit racially-charged crime would be curbed by more obvious indicators that such behavior is unacceptable.
No longer should the egregious mistakes of the privileged, especially when those mistakes threaten violence against oppressed groups, be swept beneath a policy of tolerance when their actions are the very opposite of the progress that tolerance promises.
To be a drunken college student is not an excuse for violence against either hamster or human.
And if the answer is expulsion from school and action under the fullest extent of the law when a crime is committed, so be it. Change is impossible until then.
