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Feeling Safe

The Trump administration voices a concern about antisemitism on college campuses. In light of that, I found a recent news report interesting. It stated that according to a survey conducted among Harvard students last year,15% of Jewish students said they did not feel physically safe on campus.

Was this a high number? I wanted more context. What percentage of students overall felt physically unsafe? The report did not say.

Interestingly, the survey reported that 47% of Muslim respondents said they do not feel safe. In another aspect of the survey, 61% of Jewish students reported fearing academic or professional repercussions for expressing their political views. However, 92% of Muslim students felt the same. These data would suggest that we should be talking about more than antisemitism, but I am not expecting this broader discussion from our president.

Of course, the survey numbers by themselves could not tell me about the validity of the responses. Perhaps many who felt safe were naïve and more should have felt threatened on campus. On the other hand, some of those who felt apprehensive might not be in any real danger. (Paradoxically, people sometimes feel an increased threat from crime when the data show that crime is falling.)

Who is not in favor of people feeling safe? But the issue is more complex than the knee-jerk response indicates. Making some people feel safe often means circumscribing the actions of others. The feeling-safe-on-campus refrain today is not about guns or disease or child abuse or domestic violence. Instead, it is a reference to college protests by those who criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

For much of my half century in New York City, I lived in what authorities described as a high-crime neighborhood. That designation may have come from actual statistics, but it could have been merely a shorthand for saying whites are in the minority, which was true where I lived.

I had reasons to agree with the high-crime label. Our cars had been broken into many times. Our cars, as well as garbage cans and bikes, had been stolen. Our house had been broken into. I was mugged at knifepoint. I was frequently apprehensive and wary on the streets near my house. In other words, I was often fearful. This reached its peak around 1980, when crime was reportedly high in New York City. Some of the time I was working the equivalent of the night shift and arriving at my home subway station at eleven at night. It was only two short blocks to my house, but I was always fearful for those two blocks. Usually I was the only one getting off the train at that stop, but if a young Black man also stepped onto the platform or if I saw young Black men walking towards me on the sidewalk, I became much more apprehensive and wary. I felt unsafe.

If we reflexively agree that I should feel safe, we need to think about what actions would be necessary to make me feel safe. The answer would have been to prohibit young Black men from being on my block at night. Thus, to reduce my apprehension, we would have to substantially curb the activities (not to mention the rights) of others. The reality is that a miniscule number of young Black men constitute a threat to me. While I have been robbed twice at knifepoint by young Black men, I have passed many many many young Black men at night. Tens of thousands. Maybe much more. What are the odds that any single person might cause me harm? The answer is vanishingly small. My odds are better with the lottery.

Similarly, to make some college students feel safer, the suggestion has been to restrain the activities (and the rights) of others. Often the activities sought to be restrained are not those of physical violence or even physical activity. Instead, many want to restrict speech that makes someone feel unsafe even if that speech does not pose a reasonable risk of physical violence.

There are several issues here. First concerns the complicated subject of when and if speech should be curtailed. Volumes, of course, have been written on this topic, but it boils down to context. Some speech is incendiary, but some speech is not. Crowds screaming antisemitic epithets as Jewish students go to their dorm should be prohibited. A speaker at a peaceful rally in an auditorium who suggests that Israel is a colonial power that never should have been created…well, that should not. Restraining speech is about context, but a consideration of context requires a nuanced approach, which too many are unwilling to do.

Making me feel safe by constraining the rights of others is a tricky and a dangerous notion.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I watch a lot of athletics on TV, perhaps too much. This viewing includes women sports, but I am planning to give up watching women’s college basketball, volleyball, and softball. They are too dominated by transgender women to be enjoyable and safe. Or at least that is the impression I get from watching too much Fox News and listening to too many of our politicians.

We know that many must study little if Shelley is right when he said, “The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.”

With DOGE ripping apart the country, I have mentally started calling our president Donlon Trusk.

A wise person said, “It seems unreasonable, but the head never begins to swell until the mind stops growing.”

A social media post has said that the Russians recruited Donald Trump decades ago. Trump may merely be a fanboy of Vladimir Putin; however, many of Trump’s actions, including the destruction of America’s standing in the world, could come from a Putin playbook. There is more plausibility in the conspiracy theory that Trump is a Russian asset than many others that take root. Instead of a Manchurian candidate, do we have a Siberian president?

“I don’t lie. I improve on life.” (Perhaps) Josephine Baker.

I asked Murphy what he did for St. Patrick’s Day. He said, “Nothing. St. Pat’s is a day for amateurs.”

Qatar is often mentioned on TV, but it is pronounced in different ways. What is the correct way to say it?

My friendly boss with Irish roots had moved to the suburbs. He invited us to a wine tasting at his new parish church. After it ended, we retired to his new home across the street. We were joined by other Irish Americans who had been at the winetasting. As is usual when you put alcohol and Irish together, singing begins. An Irish Lullaby. Danny Boy. It was getting late. We were looking to get out of there since it was long drive home. We were about to stand up when a guitar appeared in the hands of a thin man. He looked around until the now raucous group got quiet. He started to sing. I have little familiarity with the genre, but it was an Irish protest song. He sang beautifully. If you weren’t crying by the end, you should have been.

I occasionally play Spelling Bee, an online game from the New York Times. You are to make words of at least four letters from seven letters with six arrayed in a circle around a seventh letter. Each word must contain that central letter. The game somewhere has an official word list, which I have never seen, but sometimes an entry that I know is a valid word, often a scientific or technical term, is rejected. However, on occasion I spot a word that I know does not exist, but I believe it should. For example, pignic: eating too much on the lawn.

Even though the administration is trying to tear down universities in the name of fighting antisemitism, it occurs to me that one of the flaws of the current administration is that it does not have enough Jewish people.

“He who blesses his neighbor with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing.” Proverbs.

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Ron and Bob: Lessons in Hate and Prejudice

Ron R. and Bob R. were cousins. The shared a last name. They were the same age as me, so we were all in the same grades growing up. They were Jewish, and they gave me some early experiences of virulent hatred and casual prejudices.

          New Yorkers are often surprised that I grew up with Jewish friends [What? They think that Jews don’t live other places besides New York?], but in my grade school classes of twenty-five or thirty, two or three were Jewish. In grade school, the Jewish kids outnumbered the Catholics. My town had Catholic grade schools, and few young Catholics went to the public elementary school that I attended. However, the town did not have a Catholic high school and about half of the students in high school, and my closest friend, were what my Baptist Sunday School teachers called “the papist religion.”

Our friendships, though, did not break down by religious or class distinctions, and I knew of no one who seemed in the least antisemitic. We noticed that the Jewish kids were absent some school days and would hear that it was a holiday for them. We Christians had some understanding of Passover (it was, after all, associated with Easter), but Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, or even Hanukkah were outside our ken. I did not know much about the Jewish faith, but I also knew little about Catholicism. The Jewish kids were just friends and classmates and not nearly as exotic as the few who were Greek Orthodox. (My first kiss, sitting on a hill that overlooked the high school in one direction and a Catholic cemetery in the other, was with who Sir Walter Scott would have called the beautiful Jewess, Miriam. I can remember my heart beating with that kiss, but I don’t remember what happened to Miriam and me.)

          Ron was more gregarious than his cousin Bob and a bit of a class clown. Although he did not play it well, he loved baseball and between classes would come running down the hall and launch a hook slide into a second base that only he could see. Almost always he was safe. (You now know how long ago this was; major leaguers don’t hook slide anymore although in those days it was a standard part of a baseball education.) Sometime after we passed puberty, he would regale us boys with dirty jokes he said that he had heard on records, but I don’t remember any explanation of where he listened to these dirty records. I did not always understand the punchlines, but I nervously laughed any way. (I even remember some of them. E.g., I was walking through a field with couples entwined everywhere. In the dark, I accidentally stepped on some guy’s back. A woman thanked me.)

          I knew that Ron’s father was a lawyer, and a highly regarded one. Somebody said that he was a labor lawyer. I did not fully understand what that meant. I could only imagine Clarence Darrow-like courtroom advocates, and even today, I can’t imagine how many clients in our small town needed a labor lawyer. I also knew that Ron’s father was important in the Democratic party, and so I was not surprised to learn, when Ron and I were in high school, that his father had been nominated by President Kennedy to be a federal judge. Ron knew that I was an anti-conservative, and while we did not talk much politics (none of the kids in my circles, at least, talked about politics or even mentioned for whom their parents voted), we did talk a bit about his father’s appointment. One day he came to school with a four-page “newspaper,” which he showed me. I knew there was such a thing as hatred of Jewish people, but I probably thought that it had largely disappeared after the WWII atrocities became common knowledge. But no, this paper had ugly articles about Ron’s father and his nomination to the bench. It was filled with kike and Hebe and crude drawings that were supposed to represent Ron’s father. It carried on with dire predictions of what would happen to Kennedy because he had made the nomination.

          This publication was shocking. I knew there was hate in this country. How could you not if you had seen the televised images of those girls entering a Little Rock school? But that was far away; it was in the South, and I thought that the South was almost another country fixated on race. I don’t know where Ron’s newspaper was written or published. I doubted that it came from my town, but it was writing about the father of a friend in my town. Its hate had invaded where I lived. Hate, I realized, did not just affect distant places, and I wondered who, and how many, in my town harbored such virulent views. I didn’t want to believe there were any, but I could no longer be so sure.

          However, since this hate was so overt and repulsive, I could not imagine that it would cause anyone who was not already an antisemitic bigot to become one. But I also knew there was danger in such hatred because it encouraged the hate-filled to band together in ways making hateful actions more likely. Such views were repulsive to me, but I also realized that their views were unlikely to change if others confronted them. I could not imagine that they would feel even vaguely uncomfortable if they were shunned or mocked. Perhaps their feelings of inferiority would only be fueled by the rejection of “nice” people. Maybe, I thought, it was best simply to avoid these hatemongers.

          But I began to doubt if the same was true for casual prejudices when I encountered them.

(Concluded February 16)