Scream On

The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the subsequent non-indictments of the police officers who caused their deaths, have shocked and saddened observers around the nation. For the past two weeks, hundreds of members of the Harvard community have come together in peaceful responses to institutional violence against minorities. The die-ins and marches have shown Harvard students at their best: The gatherings have largely been thoughtful, inclusive, and scrupulously planned. They have galvanized the university community to speak out against police brutality and pervasive institutionalized racism.

The protest on Wednesday night was a gathering of a different kind. It was planned with understandable intentions: to disrupt an established campus tradition and to show that injustice exists even in the most inconvenient moments. After all, protests on the sidelines can never match the impact of more disruptive actions in forcing the important conversations.

However, the Primal Scream protest was poorly thought out and proved to be disruptive in a hurtful way. Protestors reported that some Primal Screamers cursed at them and made lewd and threatening gestures. As a result, many protestors left feeling threatened, disrespected, and hurt. No arguments or justifications can detract from their experiences; circumstances do not excuse insensitive behavior.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the organizational tactics that caught the participants of Primal Scream off guard. From the start, the publicizing of the protest was insufficient; at the event itself, a large portion of the runners—many of whom were confused and intoxicated—did not even realize that demonstrators were asking for a moment of silence as they stood naked in the freezing rain. Moreover, the runners were preoccupied only with running a lap and putting their clothes back on, the weather being quite cold. In retrospect, it was completely unreasonable for a group of clothed people to demand without warning that their naked classmates stand silently in the cold.

Primal Scream is meant to be a community event, a time for bonding and stress relief. Whether intentionally or not, this particular protest was divisive, casting as opponents a group of confused and probably quite cold individuals who may or may not have stood with the protestors if given due notice.

The systematic oppression of non-white Americans is clearly a cause that deserves attention and outrage. The Harvard community speaks loudest when it speaks in one voice, not when it is divided. Even in these emotionally tense times, we should not engage in behaviors that turn students against each other. Though the Primal Scream protest boosted campus awareness of the movement, it did so at the cost of dividing the community, and led many Primal Screamers to feel that they too had been misunderstood and mischaracterized.

These issues with this particular protest should not detract from the movement itself, for its message is too important. All of us should be outraged; all of us should be protestors. But even as students on this campus protest, they must resist tactics designed to create rifts within the university community. Had Wednesday’s protest been organized with intent to unite, Primal Scream could have become a moving example of Harvard standing as one against injustice.

We fervently hope that the protest on Wednesday night and its aftermath prove to be an outlier. The movement is centered on the importance of human respect; compromising this core principle succeeds only in harming the movement and its goal. Internal discord forgets the desperate and essential point: Black lives matter.