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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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No Where is Outside Mississippi
Susan Briante
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Last spring amidst a wave of protests at college campuses, a group of students at Emory University raised tents to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and an end to the construction of the “Atlanta Public Training Center,” dubbed “Cop City.” They also created a document, “Emory is Everywhere,” that I have returned to recently at the end of this long dark year. It begins:
As the Palestine Solidarity movement rips across college campuses, college administrators and government bureaucrats are rushing to denounce anyone taking action as an “outside agitator.” Those who grease the gears of the war machine think that this rhetoric will erode public support for bold actions at Emory. They are wrong.
45 years after the Camp David Accords—an infamously botched, imperialist plan for peace between Israel and Egypt with no input from Palestinians—was orchestrated by an Emory faculty alum President Carter, we observe that there is nowhere on Earth “outside” of Emory University.
The manifesto continues to document the many ways the students believe their university is implicated in broader struggles for social justice:
Emory University has the highest tuition, the lowest acceptance rate, and by far the highest endowment of any institution in Georgia. Economic barriers, infamously racist standardized testing, and nepotism have barred many from studying at Emory. To students in Atlanta and beyond—we invite you to struggle with us…Emory’s $11 billion endowment, the 11th highest in the country, is an outsized influence in Atlanta’s economy. While economic inequality widens in the city, Emory remains a bastion of the rich. To the restaurant workers, house cleaners, gig workers, and all proletarians—we invite you to struggle with us….In 2020, Emory University laid off or furloughed over 1500 employees. To those who are no longer affiliated with the university—we invite you to struggle with us…
I am not interested in this document because I harbor any particular animosity toward Emory University, another corporatized institution of higher learning, not unlike the one for which I work. Without minimizing the students’ grievances, the gesture in “Emory is Everywhere” that levels blame at the institution feels less important to me (at a time when there is plenty of blame to go around) than the invitation it becomes. The authors of this manifesto rhetorically open their encampment and struggle to make room for other students, the working class, the unemployed, and the unhoused. Their observation that “there is nowhere on Earth ‘outside’ of Emory University” is what gets me. It does not read as the kind of “we’re-the-center-of-the-universe” egocentrism so often used to dismiss the views of the young. Instead of sounding like the earliest astronomers, who thought the universe revolved around the earth, the authors of “Emory is Everywhere” remind me of contemporary physicists who understand that the far-flung universe and every particle within it are bound by webs of strings, a weft of dark matter, and “spooky” attractions between the atomic particles that make up ourselves and our world.
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In January 1971, Fanny Lou Hamer addressed a predominantly white audience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to raise money for her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which grew food for the poor of Sunflower county in her home state of Mississippi. Nixon was just two years in office and a little less than three years from impeachment. The Vietnam War continued to rage. Hamer, a sharecropper and civil rights activist, rose to national attention combating efforts to deny Blacks the right to vote and founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the Mississippi state Democratic party’s efforts to block African American participation. She spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, calling for mandatory integrated state delegations, and organized the Freedom Summer, bringing hundreds of college students, Black and white, to register African American voters in the segregated South.
By the time she arrived in Wisconsin in 1971, Hamer had turned her attention to poverty, raising money to purchase Food Stamps for those in need and expanding the Freedom Farm where she and others raised livestock and produce to alleviate hunger. During her speech, she reminded her white audience of the work of other white Civil Rights activists, such as Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goldman, who were brutally murdered in 1964 along with James Chaney by Ku Klux Klan members near Philadelphia, Mississippi. She told the Wisconsin crowd: “And when they died, they didn’t just die for me, but they died for you because your freedom is shackled in chains to mine. And until I am free, you are not free either.”
Hamer continued: “And if you think you are free, you drive down to Mississippi with your Wisconsin license plate, and you will see what I am talking about.”
No where is outside Mississippi, she might have said.
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In the wake of the election to the US presidency of a convicted criminal, who tried to overturn the results of a previous presidential election, which he lost, and who (as a candidate) has threatened the rights of large swaths of the US population, I think a lot about the struggles that will bind and implicate us in the months ahead. The ideas of both ancestor and student activists will be necessary in our fight against policies and rhetorics that incite and divide. Hate is no “spooky” relationship. It is often very clear and estranging, a blade and gun. It causes despots to rise and bombs to fall.
Atlanta police and Georgia State troopers tore down tents and arrested 28 student and faculty protestors at Emory University in April. As at many other universities, Emory’s administration created new rules limiting protest and prohibiting encampments. And yet, Emory students gathered for a pro-Palestinian demonstration as recently as September.
The Israeli government’s assault on Gaza continues with the Palestine Health Ministry estimating more than 43,000 Palestinians killed at least half of whom were women and children.
Physicists tell us that “spooky” actions or “quantum entanglements” exist between particles such that “aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them,” according to physicist Andreas Muller. These entanglements suggest that “when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart.” This relationship has been proven by strings of equations and decades of experiments; yet there remains no simple explanation for it. It exists beyond our laws or comprehension.
I find comfort that there is so much we still do not know about our universe or the rules that govern it or each other. I find comfort that we still can’t predict what will happen when a young Palestinian uploads a video in Gaza or a college student in Georgia picks up a pen, when a Black sharecropper and organizer speaks to a predominantly white audience, or white college students organize voters in Mississippi. It is impossible to know what relationships formed in protest and solidarity might produce in terms of new ways of imagining our social dynamics, community, and connections, how new social challenges will engender new alliances and solutions.
In 1971, Hamer ended her speech in Madison (which was not read from the page but spoken from the heart: “I’m just here to rap and tell you what it is and to tell you like it is” ) recounting a time she had just been released from prison where she was beaten until her “body was hard as metal.” Still, she asked to be taken to see the Statue of Liberty:
I told the man that I was riding with that day, I said, “I would like to see this statue turned around to face her own problems. And the torch out of her hand with her head bowed because we have as many problems in this country as they trying to point to in other countries.”
I like to imagine the statue as Hamer wanted to see her: turning her head to look toward Manhattan, dropping her arm. If we could uncoil ourselves beyond the gestures of self-mythology and postures of our identities, if we could turn to face our own problems, what would we see?
There is nowhere on Earth ‘outside’ of Emory University. Everywhere is Mississippi. It’s 1964 and 2024. Our freedom is shackled to one another’s, none of us are free until all of us are free:
to speak at the Democratic Convention, to vote, to make choices about our own bodies. Free from bombs and brutality and hunger.
It seems so simple and so impossible.
It is way past time we all drove down to Mississippi with our Wisconsin license plates. Get in the car.
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Quotes from Fanny Lou Hamer’s University of Wisconsin speech come from Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
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Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument and of the forthcoming 13 Questions for the Next Economy.
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