From the article:
“A number of students have actually come out to defend the post, including student activist Vincente Perez. He stated, “Someone felt they had to show something extreme to get people to care. Think about that. This is not a justification. But think about what the weight of apathy can force people to do.”
Fourth-year Jaime Sanchez, who co-led protests about the incident, said that it doesn’t matter that the post was fake.
“From the very beginning, our movement was never about particular incidents; it was about addressing the structural problem of everyday micro-aggressive racism on campus,” he explained. “It’s unfortunate that this betrayal happened, but it was never even about the Facebook incident to begin with. It was always about the larger culture of intolerance that we should continue to focus on.”
Mr. Sanchez, please define “structural problem of micro-aggressive racism.”
And, how can the fake Facebook be both unfortunate and not the issue at the same time?
Were you already leading protests about the “structural problem of micro-aggressive racism” on campus before the incident? If not, then the false posting was the catalyst.
Building your protest movement on lies and exaggeration is really good strategy for discrediting yourself and the “cause.”
The Perez kid is actually pretty smart; he gets that the real enemy to his movement is apathy, not outright opposition.
What he doesn’t get is that fake or overblown incidents like these only increase that apathy. People cease to be able to distinguish between what us real and what isn’t, what is truth and what isn’t do they just become cynical and cease to care.
Case in point is how the exploitation of the Martin and Brown deaths are probably driving down outraged reaction to the Gardner death among the general public.
And attempts to infuse life into reactions through guilt trips (#crimingwhilewhite) only make that apathy and cynicism worse.