by Steven Strauss, Quillette
In Sudan, a civil war involving Arab supremacists backed by the UAE has left as many as 400,000 dead and displaced twelve million. The silence on campus is deafening.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen as big of a disconnect between the scale of a crisis and the scale of media coverage in my life… And that is both because the scale of the suffering in Sudan is so high and because the [media] coverage is abominably low. —Tom Perriello, the Biden administration’s special envoy to Sudan.
A student interrupted one of my lectures to deliver a passionate speech on what she called “digital apartheid” as practised by Israel. The lecture—at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs—was about how the use of smart data for city planning might negatively impact low-income people of colour in America. While the company providing the data I used was American, it had begun as an Israeli startup and many of the employees mentioned in the class readings had Jewish-sounding names.
I allowed interested students to have their say about this issue then tried to steer discussion back to the assigned readings, noting that those who wished to discuss digital apartheid could do so at any number of school events on Israel and Palestine. But some students were adamant that anyone unwilling to use lecture time to discuss the topic was complicit in Israeli apartheid, genocide, and other crimes. The atmosphere grew awkward. Most students remained prudently silent.
Eventually, a black student intervened. She had come to class to discuss the assigned readings, she told us. If these students had the moral right to commandeer the class to discuss Israel, she added, why didn’t she have the right to demand a discussion of oppression in Africa? It was a good question.