Here’s the link I was sent to : Death Threats and Hate Crimes, Attacks On Women Bloggers Escalating . The piece of the conversation below is from discussing it on Facebook though.
My comment:
This makes me think the web newbies of the world are experiencing what I did in 1993, thinking of the internet (such as it was then) as a place where I couldn’t yet conceptualize that I was talking to real people with emotions and sometimes bad intentions, on account of how young and stupid I was then.
I was not quite stupid or mean enough to ever get threatened, just dumb enough to think that people wouldn’t threaten me for any number of insane things. Dumb enough to attract other dumb people who think they’re the only people with the means to threaten people and carry those threats out.
I remember when I was in college, after a racist article was published in the school newspaper, and my mentor spoke out about it, and wrote a letter to the editor on our behalf. I was sitting in his office when he got the death threat by telephone. It was alarming how calm he was.
He was on the phone in his office, and looked up at me, then behind me to the hallway. And he said “would you say that again?” His face didn’t change, his voice just … hardened. I got chills.
PS- Ms M. – I hear what you’re saying. Name names, and not just because it continues otherwise. It’s easier to tell the story, not to mention to get people to rally around you. Speaking about them anonymously gives the air that you’re in the wrong. I think maybe she was traumatized and not thinking straight.
I had some further thoughts on this issue but the post I was creating was truncated by Facebook’s enter key issue. I went on to say that my mentor at the time didn’t take the threat as seriously as we did, if memory serves, and we insisted he call the campus police. They escorted him for about 24 hours I think (this was 20 years ago).
Then we organized our own schedule of protection for him until under his insistence this time, we stopped.
He was – and is – such a treasure to me. I learned critical thinking from him, a very valuable skill that has shaped my entire life. Not to mention what an unsung hero he is.
Name a prominent social figure in civil rights or contemporary black history, he has some connection to them. But instead of exploiting these connections for his own gain, he leveraged them for our education.
And thinking someone would want to kill him for speaking out really affected me.
But it also equipped me with resolve.
Since then whenever I have been threatened for my views or for how I was born – female, Black, African, I’ve known how to proceed, because I knew how to conduct myself before it ever came up. People say they’re not afraid to die – I mean it.
Not for a cause.
Not to be martyred.
(Partly because I don’t think death is the end of existence – if matter cannot be created or destroyed, I believe that includes the soul. Besides the fact that I continue to create what I’d like to live on after me. Hopefully others can learn from my life and struggles and triumph and joy and pain.)
I hope I don’t die by violence, especially not over a reason as stupid as .001% of my genetic makeup is different from another person’s.
But I pity the person who ever reasoned it would stop me.
It has the opposite effect on people who’ve seen how a death threat can change someone’s life, up close, as well as those around them.
Don’t think the thing that makes us vocal ends with our deaths. If anything our voices go from loud to deafening. Violence is always the dumbest solution to a problem, and in this case, it’s not a solution at all.
You put a person to death for their beliefs and you turn a few lone voices into a movement.
And we don’t stop…