Silence acts

La Verdad
    By Terra Lawson-Remer

I don't believe in neutrality. We dismiss apathy as an expression of disinterested positions, and thus construct our apathetic silences as neutrality. Yet silence privileges those who can speak. Silence perpetuates the status quo. Silence is not neutral.

A recent report by the Guatemalan Truth Commission revealed the brutal efforts of the Guatemalan government, with the aid of the U.S., went to in the '80s just to insure silence about its atrocities. If silence were neutral, why would terror be employed to maintain it at all costs?

SARA EDWARD-CORBETT/YH

Last week was Rape Awareness Week—marked by the Take Back the Night rally—and a time for people to raise their voices about violence against women. In one scene of the movie The Accused, starring Jodie Foster, CC '84, (shown during Awareness Week) three men raped a woman in a bar full of men. One man didn't participate, but neither did he object. His silence created space for the powerful to dominate.

The week before last was Gay Pride Week at Yale. It was a time to break the silence that permits homophobia at Yale to continue unchallenged. Silence in the midst of homophobia supports those who continue to marginalize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. Inaction and silence in the face of vicious postered attacks against the gay community would not have been neutral; inaction and silence would instead have condoned such attacks.

To see an injustice and not cry out is to allow it to continue. In today's world, silence as neutrality is a false construction. The global political economy is so intertwined that no area of contestation is left unconnected. Do you buy Nike shoes? Then you are actively benefiting from the exploitation of Indonesian garment workers. Do you eat fresh fruits and vegetables? Then you are providing profits to growers who systematically deny basic rights to farm workers.

Your actions are more direct if you own stock in any of these companies. Do you have a pension, belong to a union, own a mutual fund, or attend a school with an invested endowment? Then you are the owner and profiteer of these corporations.

As students, we benefit from our positions at an elite university. Licensing agreements to reproduce the Yale logo further institutional prestige and earn a small profit. If the manufacturers using our logo produce their clothes in sweatshops, we condone that abuse by stamping our name on their product. The Yale endowment helps pay for our professors, our dorm renovations, and our Spring Fling, among other things. If that money comes from companies selling arms to dictators, tobacco to kids, or "terminator" seeds to Chiapas peasant farmers, we are directly benefiting from these activities.

The School of the Americas (SOA) is an Army training center for Latin American soldiers located in Ft. Benning, Ga. A list of graduates reads like a Top 40 countdown of human rights abusers, except that there are closer to 40,000 grads. They include the Salvadoran soldiers who killed six Jesuit priests in 1989, the Salvadoran officers who killed Archbishop Romero and raped and killed four U.S. churchwomen in 1981, Argentinean dictator Leopoldo Galtieri, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and half of the Colombian army officers accused of human rights abuses, among others. This school is funded by taxpayer money and approved year after year by our representatives. If citizens don't raise their voices to shut down the SOA, Congress will continue to fund it in perpetuity.

Our involvement with these systems of power is unavoidable. Thus neutrality is impossible. By consuming and existing, we act in ways that favor certain groups and interests. Even if we could retreat to a cave, sew our own clothes, and truly disconnect ourselves from global relations of power and oppression, our silence would still act in support of the status quo.

When you fail to take a stand, to get involved, to make a statement on some issue, don't think you do not act. Don't think that your apathy makes you neutral.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• We are all murderers, 4/2/99
• Breaking the policy paradigm, 3/4/99
• Doing the drug thing in Latin America, 2/19/99

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