Krista Widner
According to an article in today’s issue of the Cornell Daily Sun, last Tuesday’s Ferguson-related protest in downtown Ithaca that shut down two intersections was peaceful. The headline of the article, authored by Zoe Ferguson, is “Route 13 Closed During Peaceful Ferguson Protest in Ithaca.”
I started to wonder: Was the protest indeed peaceful, and what does it mean to peacefully protest?
At Tuesday’s event, which started out as a vigil and quickly grew into a loud, confrontational protest, no one was hurt and no property was damaged. Though people were threatened—including your correspondent—and property was attacked—Kat Yang-Stevens and her cohort slammed car hoods—nothing substantially bad or destructive occurred. It was not Ferguson-like chaos. It was not a quasi-war zone. All it really consisted of was 100 people displaced across a city block hollering and chanting for two hours.
Since the Sun article is written in objective news style, it is difficult to ascertain whether Ferguson (the writer) was actually present at the protest. I’m inclined to say she was not.
With Kat and Co. threatening bystanders, slamming car hoods, screaming at police and drivers, it is a stretch to call such a scene peaceful. It was not violent either, but peacefulness is not defined by the absence of violence.
But if Ithaca’s Ferguson protest does not qualify as peaceful or violent, what word or words do best describe it? Confrontational, disruptive, asinine, standoffish, cacophonous, disorganized, and unruly are words that, fittingly, come to mind. However, there seems to be a need for some sort of sliding scale, for each of these words could just as fittingly describe the violent protests in Ferguson.
But enough of the semantics. That type of discourse usually ends up nowhere. What I’m more interested in is whether or the protesters truly desired to “peacefully” protest. Surely some did. I don’t doubt that. But I also don’t doubt for a second that the professional protesters and agitators who showed up later to co-opt the vigil into a brouhaha had anything else in mind.
In the Ithaca Voice’s report—which is much better than the Sun’s—supposed protest leader Jaimi Hendrix blames Cornell and Ithaca College students for the escalation of events on Tuesday evening. She is quoted saying that the college students were more interested in having “an emotional event.”
From the Ithaca Voce:
Cornell students who wanted to make a splash had their fun Tuesday night, Hendrix said, but that will not make a difference for those who have to live here for the long haul.
Compare these two quotes from Hendrix with a section of the Daily Sun article.
Cornellians who attended said the protest was peaceful and not disruptive.
Jessica Eustace grad said she believes the vigil was not “hijacked” by angry protesters, but that the demonstration evolved naturally as “an emotional process.”
