Within the past few weeks, I have been irritated over and over again at the loudness of Brandeis’s calls to issue noise complaints and police its students over the “guise” of safety and prevention from the coronavirus. These calls ignore how noise complaints have disproportionately targeted students of color more than anyone else. The prevalence of white students calling Community Advisors (CAs) for noise complaints on Black and Latino students is alarmingly noticeable given Brandeis’s claim to social justice.
In a time where restorative justice—an idea that has been called upon by racial minorities in this country since the ’60s—has been popularized enough to leak into white circles, it is incredibly obnoxious to witness the number of noise complaints filed by “quiet” white students on their Black and brown peers for being “loud.”
To white students, filing noise complaints to CAs might seem like the safe and most judicial option. This is seldom true when filed against Black and brown students. It’s not the safest, it is not the most judicial and it is definitely not the most respectful option you have. It is your calling of CAs that is intrinsically parallel to calling the cops. It is your choice to police your floormates of color through the issuing an authority to control their volume because of the way your own biases have perceived it to be something that you can control.
We see so often, and only ever mildly criticize, how white people in society will call the police on Black and brown people doing normal things, but we must first understand that this white entitlement does not originate in adulthood. It is a pattern that is taught from birth and is grown throughout childhood into adolescence and blossoms to its fullest as an adult. Your reaction to hearing a gathering of Black and brown students and believing calling the authorities is the most appropriate response is your entitlement to policing minorities coming to fruition.
All social groups at Brandeis University gather, play music loudly, play video games loudly, have loud dinner parties and socialize to an extent that can necessitate a noise complaint, yet it is the gatherings that play “black” music and include Black and brown bodies that are consistently policed.
It is only these groups that have to be constantly aware of the likelihood that a CA will be called on them, and it is these groups that have to socialize (or not socialize) with an overarching fear of being disciplinarily targeted due to the biases of their white peers.
It is only these groups that have to live with the knowledge that the very people in their building, all of whom act exactly the same way, are willing to call authorities before even talking to you.
It is this disrespect that proves to the Black and brown students of this campus that the racial justice we are aiming at bringing forward is still being scapegoated and ignored by a silent white population.
In the age of the coronavirus, filing noise complaints and issuing authorities to the rooms of Black and brown students is not just an exemplification of your biases being actualized in policing, but it is also your agreement to the possibility of those same students having to face exaggerated forms of penalty due to the biases of the Brandeis administration. It is your feeding into the institutions and those institutions’ patterns that exist to police Black and brown bodies. The next time you are thinking of filing noise complaints, issuing the authorities or generally creating formal acts of aggression against students of color, remind yourself that the very real option of knocking on their door and asking them to quiet down still exists.
