Tuesday, October 9: The day Jim Crow showed his face at Columbia University.

In the most racially-diverse big city in the country, at one of the premier academic institutions in America, a noose was found hanging on the office door of Madonna Constantine, an African-American professor at Teachers College and a longtime advocate of racial justice.

A noose can be a symbol, but in American history, it has been far more than symbolic: it was, in fact, a very real weapon used in the hands of sadistic, gleeful white mobs to hang thousands of Black men from trees since the end of the Civil War. And now, it has surfaced thousands of miles away from Jena, Louisiana and Columbia, South Carolina, and generations removed from the Civil Rights Era or the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. It has surfaced right here, right now. New York, New York, 2007.

If “racism is dead,” it sure is enjoying quite an afterlife.

“They found a noose at Columbia.” The words were spoken to me by one of a group of friends with whom I was finishing dinner that night in midtown Manhattan; he had just received the news by phone. The words were uttered softly, precisely because of the heaviness of their content. They are six words I will not forget for as long as I live. A few minutes later, another friend hit the nail on the head:

“You know what makes me angriest about this?” he said. “The fact that I’m not surprised.”

Indeed. In August and September of 2005, the entire world saw images of thousands of Black New Orleans residents drowning, or stranded on rooftops, literally begging—often in vain— for their lives. A little more than two years later, those who left these residents to die are asked to explain their actions less often than rapper Kanye West is asked to defend his comment, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina that, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

In between, we have witnessed “comedian” Michael Richards repeatedly scream racial slurs at a heckler as he reminded him that, not too long ago, Black men were lynched for being outspoken. We have heard radio host Don Imus refer to African-American female basketball players with racist and sexist slurs. (Yes, he was fired, but guess what? He will reportedly be back on the air in December.) We have felt the angry breeze from 50 bullets pumped into Sean Bell, an unarmed Black man, on the night before his wedding. We have read the writing on the wall, literally; five days after the noose was found at Columbia, graffiti was discovered in a Riverdale gas station bathroom that read: “Stop the filth and destruction of neighborhoods. Promote the white race!”

And, of course, there is the case of the Jena 6—six Black high-school students in Louisiana who face years in jail for a fistfight. This after white students who assaulted a Black student were given nothing more than probation. This after a Black student was charged with theft for grabbing a gun pointed at him. And yes, this after white students hung nooses as a threat to Black students who had sat underneath a “whites-only” tree.
In the aftermath of the noose being found at Teachers College, many students in the Columbia community emailed one another with subject lines to the effect of, “Jena at Columbia.” True, but it’s bigger than that: if a noose can be found in New York City, often considered the multi-cultural nerve center of American liberalism, then where can’t one be found?

In actuality, Jena has come to America. Now, it is time for America—literally and figuratively—to come to Jena.

The day after the noose was found at Teachers College, hundreds of students of diverse ethnic backgrounds gathered on campus for a demonstration to denounce the incident and the hatred it embodied, and to show their support for the victimized professor. Wearing black, they chanted, “Not here, not anywhere!” and “No more nooses!” Many were no doubt inspired by the tens of thousands of protestors from all over the country who traveled to Louisiana roughly three weeks earlier.

The students are to be commended for their quick and uncompromising manifestation of resistance to racist threats, and to white supremacy in general. But their numbers should have been much bigger: Indeed, New York City has more than 8 million people.
What happened at Teachers College is not a Columbia issue, a New York City issue, or even an American issue, though it is also all of those things. It is an issue of basic humanity, of the kind of world we want to live in.

Since we know that racism has been anything but dormant in the past few decades, the recent proliferation of openly-racist threats and slurs sharply raises a vital question: Why do white supremacists seem to increasingly feel, once again, that they can get away with spewing their hatred and organizing around it?

This is the question that we, as a society, must now confront. And we must realize that if we fail to do so—if we fail to unite in defiance of racist acts—those committing them will only become more emboldened.