Last night, after I posted about what happened at UCLA, I got a text from a friend — “Police Brutality against Houston Janitors!” Eyes widened, I took a breath, and propped myself up against a wall.
I am not startled that such brutality spans from UCLA to Houston and back. But I am startled that this is happening in my tiny world. I spent more than a year working for the Houston Justice for Janitors campaign and feel connected to the pound of flesh I left there. A friend had told me the other day that he was considering participating in the civil disobedience to support the Janitor strike. I was immensely supportive and tried to make him do it. So when I got that text, my fears about an impersonal, courtesy-of-you-tube police brutality – a political set of fears – became intensely personal. This tangled mess made me, well, a bit of a mess.
I went to the Houston Janitors website and watched the video – people I knew in the video were getting arrested but I couldn’t see my friend. I made phone calls and didn’t hear back. No one was picking up. No one would answer.
I eventually got a call from him and he reassured me that he’s OK. He had decided not to participate in the civil disobedience. I exhaled.
But after attending the protest today at UCLA, where the messaging was around public safety rather than police brutality and race, I realize that we do not have much time. We don’t have time to obfuscate, to skate over the issues that dig deep into us and threaten to rip us all apart.
If we don’t call things as they are – that Mostafa was targeted because he was a Persian male, that he was cuffed and then tazed more than four times because he was a person of color, that the UCPD’s actions have created a climate of fear for people of color all over campus, that ’safety’ as a message only means more cops and no change in accountability – then we all suffer.
We don’t have time to call things otherwise because eventually we all are going to be hit by this. And it will hurt like hell when it happens to us or to someone we love.
Update: My blog posts have been picked up by WireTap, an excellent on-line magazine run by AlterNet. Please visit and post!
[...] My friend Vivek is a law student at UCLA and writes at a wonderful blog called Your Good Name. He participated in a protest organized by UCLA students, on the issue of a Persian-American student who was tasered (stunned by a stun gun with 50,000 volts) several times by community police in the university library. And he had this to say about the framing of the protest: But after attending the protest today at UCLA, where the messaging was around public safety rather than police brutality and race, I realize that we do not have much time. We don’t have time to obfuscate, to skate over the issues that dig deep into us and threaten to rip us all apart. [...]
Left by los anjalis » Shock and awe: thoughts on the UCLA taser incident on November 21st, 2006