Don Lee - The Collective

“Wait a minute,” Joshua said. “What about fingerprints?”

“Pardon?” Nordquist said.

“You’re not going to call the St. Paul police?”

“Why don’t we talk about this.”

We sequestered ourselves in Jessica’s room, just the four of us. “I’m so sorry this has happened to you,” Nordquist said. “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry. We’re a college that respects each other’s differences, that’s committed to tolerance and understanding. When something like this happens, it’s an attack on our entire community.”

We were all standing, huddled in a cramped circle. For a moment, Nordquist was distracted, looking over our heads at Jessica’s sketches, drawings, watercolors, and oils pinned to the walls. He had wavy reddish blond hair and rimless eyeglasses, and he was dressed neatly in a mango-orange Mac polo shirt and pressed khakis. “These are very good,” he said to Jessica.

“Thank you,” she said tentatively.

“My immediate concern is the three of you. I want you to know, we’ll do everything within our power to meet your every need.” He told us that if we felt threatened and wanted safety escorts, even round-the-clock security, they would accommodate us. The head of Campus Security, the nurse and counselor from Health Services, the minority program director, the provost, the president — they would all come to visit us soon. “So will the chaplain, if you so wish. I don’t know your spiritual affiliations.” He would talk to our teachers. If we wanted to leave campus right now and postpone our final assignments and exams, we’d be free to do so without academic penalty. They’d make special arrangements, and we could worry about the makeups later. “I’ll talk to your families as well, if you so wish. Our biggest concern is that you don’t suffer the aftereffects of this trauma any more than you have to. So my question to you at this point is, how do you want to proceed? You said you want to call the St. Paul police?”

“Damn straight,” Joshua said. “I want to find the son of a bitch who did this.”

“Let me assure you, we all do,” Nordquist said. “But in incidents like these in the past—”

“What incidents?” I asked. “Things like this have happened a lot?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘a lot,’ but unfortunately, yes, there have been a few in the twelve years I’ve been here.” He mentioned a noose found in the library, a swastika drawn on the wall outside Doty Hall, KKK painted on the dorm doors of several Japanese students, a hate-mail letter sent to a Native American student. “We all like to think of Mac as a perfect place, but the sad reality is, it’s not perfect. The measure of a community, however, is in how we respond to these situations. In some instances in the past, students wanted the incidents to go unreported.”

“You mean you covered it up,” Joshua said.

“It was entirely the students’ choice.”

Needless to say, Joshua’s inclination was to distrust all authority figures. I wasn’t of the same mind back then, at least when it came to the administrators at Mac. Nordquist might have had a tendency to pontificate, but he was an honorable man, I thought.

“We’ll do whatever you want us to do,” Nordquist said. “It’s completely up to you. But let me give you a couple of scenarios and gradations therein. The reason why some of those students chose not to go public was because they wanted their privacy protected. The last thing we want is for victims to feel they’re being revictimized. Conversely, going public could be an opportunity, a teachable moment, for the entire college. It could be a platform for us to recommit ourselves to our principles and values of tolerance and”—he searched for a word he hadn’t already used—“inclusion. We could open a campus dialogue on diversity.”

“What do you mean by ‘campus dialogue’?” Jessica asked.

“I’m not sure what could be done so close to the end of the term, but meetings, forums, perhaps a convocation in Weyerhaeuser Chapel.”

If we decided to go public, he said, they would post flyers on every bulletin board on campus, describing the incident and asking anyone with information to come forward. They would not reveal our names, and they could—“if you so wish”—describe the epithets in nonspecific language to keep our ethnicity hidden.

“We’re different ethnicities,” Joshua said. “Korean and Taiwanese. You mean race.”

“Yes. I’m sorry,” Nordquist said.

After the flyers, articles would appear in the Mac Weekly , the student paper, and perhaps, especially if we involved the police, in the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune , the St. Paul and Minneapolis dailies.

“So I need for you to decide,” Nordquist said. “How do you feel about all of this? What do you want to do? It’s a big decision. These sorts of things tend to have larger ramifications than you can imagine. They can gain a certain traction or momentum.”

He left us alone to ruminate, telling us to call him at his office once we’d reached a decision.

“We’re all in agreement here, right?” Joshua said. “We go public.”

“I don’t know,” Jessica said.

“I don’t, either.”

“Why the fuck not? We can’t let this racist bullshit stand, man.”

“It’s not such a big deal,” Jessica said. “I’ve been called worse. I don’t want this thing to become a carnival act.”

I felt the same way. I could imagine the hysteria that would surely erupt, the overkill of political correctness. I could imagine the pitying looks, everyone expressing their sympathy and outrage, the teach-ins and speak-outs, the candlelight vigils and songs of unity, worst of all the convocation in Weyerhaeuser Chapel, having to speak in front of four, five hundred people.

I did not want to be an activist. A martyr. A victim. I wanted all of this to disappear. I was hurt and in shock, but I told myself I would get over it.

“Look,” I said, “finals start Monday. Nothing’s going to get accomplished. Let’s forget about it.”

“We are not going to forget about it,” Joshua said. “You think everyone doesn’t know already? The chalkboards have been up all morning. Everyone on the floor’s seen them, and I’m sure they’ve tittle-tattled the news to the entire campus. What would it look like if we did nothing? It’d look like we’re cowards, like we’re fucking coolies, willing to accept whatever abuse is doled out our way.”

“He has a point,” Jessica said to me.

“I’ve dealt with this shit all my life,” Joshua said. “No one has to tell me racism exists, even in a liberal enclave like this. But the kids here, these chummy Crisco Gomers, they have no fucking idea. They’d say there’s no way there’s any racism at Mac. They don’t understand it’s in the media and in every aspect of society. They don’t understand they have racist attitudes hidden within themselves. It’d be a wake-up call to them. Yeah, it might seem inconsequential, just some dumb fucking slurs, but you let this go, and then what happens when someone wants to pass out white supremacist literature on campus? Or print a Holocaust denial ad in the school paper? You do nothing, it becomes approval.”

He kept sermonizing for several more minutes, using the same rhetoric. Finally, Jessica and I looked at each other, and nodded.

“We’re all in?” Joshua asked.

“I don’t want to have to go to any forums or meetings,” I said.

“Not a problem.”

“I don’t want to give any speeches.”

“You won’t have to worry about that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Full disclosure.”