Intervention — “Explaining the Terror: Interpreting Violence Against Peaceful Student Protesters in the United States in Spring 2024”

Nancy Ettlinger (Ohio State University)

While the United States is implicated in Israeli’s genocide of Palestinians by supplying the weaponry, students have recognized that institutions of higher education across the country are implicated at a local level by supporting Israel through their investment portfolios. In the spring of 2024, students in over 100 US colleges and universities (Cutler et al. 2024) (hereafter “universities”) therefore protested the genocide of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, calling for their institutions to divest from Israel. Like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the United States and the world following the murder of the unarmed George Floyd in 2020, student protests across campuses in the spring of 2024 were largely peaceful but represented by the mainstream US media seeking headline news as violent (Khouri 2024), justifying violence in response. Violence indeed prevailed during the protests, not on the part of students, but rather the police who were called in by university presidents across the nation as a first, rather than last, resort. Highlighting the peacefulness of the student and BLM protests is not a normative signal, but an observation that calls attention to the absurdity and needless nature of violent police reactions, and prompts the question in the case of the student protests: of what were university administrators and local police so afraid?

Generally, police attacked both students and the tents they pitched on their campuses. On my own campus, which was outside the purview of the national media, violence was ethnic and gendered as police especially targeted women with hijabs. As indicated in a testimony published in the local newspaper, police grabbed and ripped off women’s hijabs at the site of protest, and in detention denied them the right to prayer and subjected them to strip searches without privacy (Hamadmad 2024).

Terrorizing treatment of students across universities eventually was condoned implicitly by President Biden who delivered a national, Reaganesque law-and-order speech (Biden 2024). Echoing the declarations and actions of university administrators, Biden affirmed that students have every right to express their views, but they cannot be permitted to break the law. This point echoed President Obama’s message in his tensely awaited speech following the acquittal of the police officer who murdered the unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014; in anticipation of riots, Obama, without regard for who makes the laws, under what circumstances, and at whose expense, declared “We are a nation of laws”, signaling that law trumps all else, no matter the context. The law appears sacred, at least under particular circumstances.

Student protesters generally were charged with two types of crime. First, they were said to have violated campus space rules by pitching tents and disrupting the flow of normal activity and posing a threat to safety; these allegations were the means by which to criminalize students. Especially odd about the so-called space rules is that students routinely set up hammocks on campuses in nice weather. The difference between hammocks and tents is that the former tend to be an individual act, whereas tents in the spring of 2024 were part of a collective experience that were perceived as threatening the status quo. Normal academic activity among students and faculty remained unaffected by the protests, yet the claim of disruption and threat to safety persisted. The cancellation of the commencement ceremonies at Columbia University and the University of Southern California due to concern about the presence of protesters became emblematic of the disruption caused by the protests that negatively affected students (especially those graduating), their parents, and more generally the image of the university with potentially negative implications for donations from alumni and other investors. However, given the peaceful nature of the protests, disruption and unsafe conditions were an imaginary: it was not the protests but rather fear of disruption that prompted the cancellation of the ceremonies and created the resulting problems. Second, student protesters were said to have crossed the free-speech line. Ironically, in the wake of far-right anti-DEI legislation, the liberal frame of higher education that embraces diversity has become appropriated to enable the expression notably of far-right views, with, however, punitive consequences for those with opposing views. Jewish and Palestinian student organizations, mutually concerned about violations to humanity, worked and protested side-by-side, yet the media promulgated the view that anti-Zionism is equated with antisemitism, and therefore violates free-speech rules.

The protests and the imaginaries surrounding them occurred during the 2023-2024 academic year in which the now MAGA-dominated Republican legislatures in many states across the United States enacted or proposed bills targeting the education sector. The stakes include the dissolution of DEI offices and activity, much of which was established in response to the BLM protests of 2020; elimination of tenure; mandates for the content of teaching to inculcate far-right values; and the establishment of rules for free speech. Turbulence during the 2023-2024 academic year over free-speech rules (Hicks et al. 2024; see also Blake 2024; Whittington 2024) resulted in university presidents coming “under fire” (Gersen 2023). Presidents of public universities placed in their positions by boards of trustees who were appointed by Republican governors may well have been concerned about their own positions. Donors also influence the actions of university presidents. In addition, in the general context of declining enrollment and fiscal pressure (Hatch 2022), the demand for divestment from Israel struck right into the neoliberal heart of university business. Invoking dormant space rules or new free-speech thinking enabled university administrators to justify a violent police-as-first-resort approach that terrorized students and the faculty and staff supporting them.

The MAGA context and threats to careers and to the economic status quo are viable yet partial explanations for the profound breach of trust between administrators and students in academic communities and the resulting violence against protestors. At my university, snipers with long-range rifles aimed at the students and their supporters among faculty and staff were positioned on the roof of the student union throughout the protests. With few exceptions (Moody 2024), the absence of dialogue in the context of institutions of higher education—places historically and in theory where ideas should be discussed and exchanged—and the unleashing of such force across campuses against sincere, non-violent students who have been taught in their respective institutions to think and act critically are a wake-up call to a regime of politics reflected in the similarity of instinctual violent responses of self-defense among university administrators.

Crucially, this regime of politics is diffuse, that is, it is not partisan. For Palestinians in Gaza, it doesn’t matter whether the US president is a Democrat or Republican, and in the recent presidential debate between Trump and Biden in July 2024, Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur and neither the moderator nor Biden signaled a problem (Thakker 2024). Tolerance of, and disdain for, Palestinians and Muslims more generally was evident at my university as women wearing hijabs were terrorized by police and criminalized for their identity.

Although the far right now dominates the Republican party in the United States, the “far-right” is a mentality that has spread across political parties and throughout much of the electorate. For this reason, I have used “terror” rather than “state terror” or “police terror” to describe acts against peaceful protesters because the decision structure surrounding responses to protests included not only police and state actors but also university administrators and boards of trustees while mainstream, liberal media twisted realities in their reporting and politicians across parties condemned student activity, supported the police, and backed media representations. The US student protests of spring 2024 are a case in point of Dylan Rodríguez’s (2023) argument that police brutality is acceptable when the status quo is challenged. Rodríguez (2023: 126) also argued that “police terror … is inseparable from global and regional formations of racial capitalism”, a point that speaks to the racialized nature of attacks at my university and of US foreign policy that tolerates and provides the weapons for the slaughter of innocent Palestinians while maintaining the lucrative, longstanding US–Israeli alliance.

The power relations between the white and wealthy of Israel and some of the poorest people of color in the world in Gaza under repressive Israeli governance can also be interpreted in terms of the conspiracy theory of replacement—the fear that Others, in this case, Palestinians, will replace Israelis. Replacement theory explains feelings of anger, resentment, and fear among dominant societal groups towards Others, and different groups adopting a far-right mentality deploy the theory relative to specific Others whom they fear: Jews, Muslims, feminists, immigrants of color and persons of color more generally, Indigenous peoples, members of the LGBTQ+ community, the differently abled. The concept is open to local adaptation. Although linked with the ascendance of the far right in France, the United States, and elsewhere around the world in the new millennium, fear of replacement nonetheless has a long history[1] and has served to channel hatred and fear in wide-ranging contexts over time and across space. The goal attached to replacement theory is to avoid being replaced by eliminating the Other through decapacitation.[2]

I suggest that replacement theory is the affective register of societal hierarchies of difference, or what Isabel Wilkerson (2020) has called “casteism”. Wilkerson presented caste as structure, a way to order and rank societal groups relative to differences, and she argued that the mechanisms for constructing divisions vary from one context to another. We might add that the differences among contexts produce and explain the differences among mechanisms that emerge across contexts. Race is one such mechanism of division; caste, immediately evident in most surnames,[3] is another. Wilkerson’s focus is not differences among types of divisions, but rather the remarkable circumstance that every society constructs such divisions. She aptly has been criticized for insufficient contextual analyses of differences (Khilnani 2020), a problem resulting from a focus on similarities more than differences that can be resolved by comparative contextual analysis.[4] Despite some limitations of Wilkerson’s book, casteism as an analytical framework has value, first because it is helpful in explaining generic circumstances of inequality across contexts that plague societal health at all scales. Second, connecting casteism with replacement theory as its affective register helps explain the intensity of reactions to Otherness in general, and specifically, the terror unleashed against students peacefully protesting and posing no threat to safety and normal flows of campus activity.

Another criticism of Wilkerson’s book argues that race and caste are incomparable because caste is social and religious whereas race signals oppression through capitalist exploitation and a structure that pervades every aspect of life among Black Americans (Burden-Stelly 2020). This last criticism may be especially common coming from Western scholars who may lack familiarity with “caste”. Sheetal Chhabria (2023: 138), for example, has explained that caste commonly is defined in the West as social and religious, a matter of custom and tradition, missing that caste always has been embedded in historical and material processes of accumulation and constitutes “a logic of racialisation within capitalism”. Departing from Eurocentric renditions of capitalism and recognizing capitalism’s multiple origins and contexts around the world, Chhabria argued that racial capitalism is about differences between peoples, not places. This insight helps explain the reach and durability of racial capitalism, and moreover sets the conditions for an international coalition to counter unfreedom anywhere, which as W.E.B. Du Bois (1998) argued, negates freedom everywhere. Chhabria’s intent was to extend, not dismiss, racial capitalism, and her analysis of caste-capitalism implicitly complements Wilkerson’s book while addressing and countering the major criticisms.

The disturbing pattern of oppressive behavior on the part of university administrators and police targeting peaceful, actually-non-disruptive protests in support of Palestinians, the support given by mainstream media and politicians, administrations’ bizarre invocation of dormant laws or politicized policies, targeted anger at Muslims reported on at least one campus[5] and apparent toleration of genocide in Gaza affectively connect with both casteism and replacement theory’s sense of urgency to decapacitate the Other—in this case, students. Universities strapped for cash welcome international students from around the world who pay considerably higher tuition fees than domestic students, but from the vantage point of administrators, the claiming of space by international Muslim students, even if they were joined in protest by Jews and indeed diverse students, faculty and staff, combined with the poking of institutional financial vulnerability, were unforgivable missteps. The violent response to the student protests of spring 2024 took most people by surprise, but in hindsight, the ivory tower of academe always has been an imaginary that ignores academe’s rootedness and ongoing participation in problems of the world, including the structures of difference that students and faculty study. The circumstances and affective storm surrounding the protests echo longstanding tensions wrought of difference and entrenched in worldwide societal hierarchies. Changing course requires, at the outset, recognition of the deep-seated problems that generated distrust, fear, and accepted brutality towards conscientious objectors to genocide.

[1] Renaud Camus, a French far-right theorist, popularized replacement theory in 2011, although scholars have recognized a longer history. See, for example Barder (2021), who places the origin of replacement theory with the Haitian revolution at the turn of the 19th century, and Bossen (2024), who traces replacement theory to the medieval period.

[2] Jack Bratich (2022: 9-10) explained that “elimination” in replacement theory is a process not an end result, and can be as much about subjective decapacitation as physical violence.

[3] Traditionally, caste is evident in surnames, although those engaged in anti-casteism commonly change their surnames.

[4] Sunil Khilnani (2020) also criticized Wilkerson’s hopeful “radical empathy”, which lacks due attention to justice.

[5] I do not recall mention of targeted attacks on Muslim students by the national mainstream media. The biased reporting and false representation of student violence by the national mainstream media suggest to me that numerous incidents during the protests across campuses may have been unreported.

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