Recent student protests against the war in Gaza at campuses all across America have been subjected to repeated acts of police violence and aggression. These protests, despite being portrayed as violent and dangerous by college administrators, the media and even the President of the United States, have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But the repeated police violence against protesters has resulted in the creation of narratives meant to justify this violence as necessary. In other words, the protests are being portrayed as violent in order to defend the violent response of the police and college administrators. By making the public frightened of these students, the government and media hopes to distract people from the cause these student protesters are fighting for (freedom for Palestine and an end to war and genocide), and to justify the violence used against the students. This weaponization of fear in order to oppress and marginalize a group is something Sara Ahmed discusses at length in her 2004 essay “Affective Economies”, and it is the lens through which I will be examining the public response to student protests, focusing specifically on President Biden’s White House address and the way in which the protests have been presented in the news. I will begin with a summary of Ahmed’s article, and describe her ideas on the way emotions are used to unite a group under a shared identity, by creating a false narrative of the dangerous or frightening “other”. Then I will describe the response to student protests, and the way in which Ahmed’s “Affective Economies” can help us better understand and contextualize this response.
Emotions, according to Sara Ahmed’s “Affective Economies”, play an active role in society. Emotions are not private. They are public, powerful, and tools capable of forming groups and shaping societies. Emotions both influence and are influenced by their social contexts. They help form groups and provide those groups with a shared sense of identity. But while emotions can bring people together, they can also work to separate groups from each other and create division. Emotions, according to Ahmed, are not passive, and much of the “othering” that takes place in our society has its roots in some kind of emotion. Emotions are a force that gives rise to action. Advertising campaigns, politicians and leaders all intentionally produce an intense emotional reaction in their audience, because when people are emotionally invested in a belief, they are more inclined to act upon it in a driven and united way. Sara Ahmed discusses the way in which hatred, specifically, is used to unify a group of people against a common enemy while positioning themselves as victims.
While emotions such as hatred create these groups, these emotions are often sustained by narratives created to establish the group as the victim and therefore to justify their hatred of the “other”. A narrative decides who is the victim and who is the perpetrator, or, as Ahmed writes, who is the “injured party” (Ahmed, 118). If a group believes it is the injured party, then they can easily transfer the blame of the “injuring” to the object of their hatred. Ahmed grounds her arguments in an example of a racist, white supremacist organization who create their harmful and destructive narratives based purely on emotion.
Emotions, according to Ahmed, are powerful partly because of their ability to create links between things that otherwise would not be connected. Emotions, in Ahmed’s words, “slide sideways” (120)—they fabricate cause and effect where it does not exist, disregard logic and chronological order by connecting two completely disparate and unrelated things. Emotions do not follow laws of logic and this emotional linking of otherwise disconnected things allows, as Ahmed writes, hate to “slide sideways between figures, as well as backward, by reopening past associations that allow some bodies to be read as the cause of “our hate” or as “being” hateful.” (Ahmed, 120). This “sliding” between unrelated things helps to build the improbable but often powerful narratives utilized by hate groups such as the white supremacists in Ahmed’s article. And through these narratives, the “fantasy of violation” (Ahmed, 119) is established, with the white supremacists (falsely) establishing themselves as victims of violation or harm at the hands of the groups they are trying to oppress.
As well as hate, Ahmed focuses on how fear is not something inherent in a subject or situation. The “other” is not scary, we have just been taught to fear it. “Through the circulation of signs of fear, the other becomes fearsome.” (Ahmed, 127). In other words, we make something frightening by communicating its frightening-ness to others.
To me, Ahmed’s article seemed like the most fitting lens through which to understand the dismissive and fear-driven media and government response to recent pro-Palestinian student protests, but before applying the theory I’ve just outlined to this example, I will provide a brief description of the protests and certain responses to them.
These protests begun in April of this year at university campuses all across the United States (and globally, although for the purposes of this essay, I will focus only on the US). The protests are the result of months of prior activism, with students demanding their universities divest money from Israel, while also protesting for a ceasefire and against Israel’s continued attacks on Palestinian civilians. But ever since April 17, 2024, when police violently intervened and completed mass arrests of students at Columbia University under the direct orders of Columbia’s president, the police have taken an increasingly extreme response to student protesters, arresting over 2,100 students (and even a few faculty members and professors) at over 40 other US colleges. And when President Biden finally gave a speech addressing the protests on Thursday May 9, 2024, he accused the protesters of being violent in order to avoid condemning the brutal police response. Biden also stated that: “Violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is. It’s against the law when violence occurs.” (Biden). In accusing the protesters of being violent, Biden was also calling the protests “against the law” which was a veiled way of defending the arrests and police violence, because if the protesters were criminals then of course they would be treated as such. Interestingly, however, when Biden justified his use of “violent” to describe the protests, he listed actions such as trespassing, vandalism, and shutting down campuses, none of which would normally qualify as violent. Disruptive, maybe, but hardly violent. Still, in order to excuse his refusal to listen to the protestors’ demands, Biden needed to call them violent. And his opinion was shared by many other politicians who publicly spoke out in support of him following the address.
On May 2, 2024 The Atlantic published an article by Tyler Austin Harper titled “American Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed”, that discusses how college administrations have almost universally condemned the student protests, and how colleges have often been the ones to request an extreme police presence, or even, in the case of the Columbia protests, demand that mass arrests take place. Harper’s article compares universities’ extreme response to the protests with those same colleges’ pro-activism rhetoric. These universities use their legacies of student activism (even though historical protests were also punished severely in their own time) as a selling point, while not actually wanting to support real life student protests at all. Harper writes, using one Ivy League as an example, that: “Cornell is one of many universities that champion their legacy of student activism when convenient, only to bring the hammer down on present-day activities when it’s not.” (Harper). Colleges are acting hypocritically, in not only refusing to practice live up to the critical-thinking, activism-centered, and anti-war image they are using to attract students, but actively going against this image while doing the opposite: punishing students in a way that can only be called undemocratic, unjust and harmful—firstly to the students but also, surely, to their own reputations. While colleges are actively proving they do not respect the right to free speech and peaceful protest, the media covering the issue is also painting a version of the truth that places the student protesters in the role of the violent troublemakers and justifies the measures taken by college administrators to stop them. Politico calls the protests “extreme”, while the New York Post and other tabloid papers are filled with articles about the “unlawfulness” and “chaos” of the protests. Even the New York Times has published long-form articles about the disruptiveness of the protests on a relatively few universities’ commencements and class schedules. The result of this news coverage is that the goals of the protesters and the ways they have been mistreated are dismissed in favor of a new narrative that portrays the universities, and the public, as victims.
I will now return to Sara Ahmed’s “Affective Economies” and her theories about the role of emotions in galvanizing groups and spurring the spread of fear and hateful ideologies. I believe that when universities, media, the police, and the President all react to peaceful student protests with aggression, violence, and dismissal of the actual cause, they are acting from a purely emotional basis. And their attempts to form false, self-victimizing narratives in order to justify their mistreatment of the protesters are a perfect example of what Ahmed calls the “fantasy of violation” (Ahmed 118). Ahmed also writes, later in that same passage, about the importance of these false narratives for the production of an emotional response which incites a group to turn against the “other” because they believe themselves to be the victims. “The ordinary or normative subject is reproduced as the injured party: the one “hurt” or even damaged by the “invasion” of others. The bodies of others are hence transformed into “the hated” through a discourse of pain.” (Ahmed, 118) In this case, specifically, it is college buildings and public areas that are being “invaded” by the protesting students, who, while normally a part of the body of the university are now othered through their alleged invasion. And then this “invasion” is used as an excuse for university administrations to send the police to attack and punish students.
The way hate and fear moves between bodies and subjects in seemingly illogical ways is outlined multiple times by Ahmed in “Affective Economies”; and it is in this ability to move and shape shift almost infinitely while avoiding being pinned down that fear and hatred are able to take hold so quickly and sway people’s opinions and actions so effectively. “It is the failure of emotions to be located in a body, object, or figures that allows emotions to (re)produce or generate the effects that they do.” (Ahmed, 124). In other words, emotions like hate and fear can attach themselves to anything without being pinned down. It is often language, Ahmed explains, that allows it to make these attachments. Words are signs, according to Ahmed, and through the various associations they carry, are often used to signal meaning—or causality—between two things. Here is an example: when Biden, in his address concerning the protests, used the word “forcing” in the following phrase: “forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations”, the sentence on a surface level did not imply anything too incriminating, but “force” is the same word used to describe the violent police mistreatment of protesters. So when Biden uses the word “force” to describe actions done by the student protesters, he is taking a connection through a sign word (“force”) made originally between students and police that set up the students as victims and reusing that same sign word in a new setting, where the students are now the perpetuators of “force” not the victims of it. This tells an audience to see the students as aggressive and requiring discipline and approves the police’s use of force as necessary.
In the same address, Biden also sets up the students as, to use Ahmed’s phrase, an “object of fear”, when he states that: “I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions. In America, we respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence, without destruction, without hate, and within the law.” (Biden.) Again, without coming out and saying it directly, Biden is by heavy implication calling the student protestors violent, destructive, hateful and lawless. These accusations leave him, and all those working in opposition to the protestors, in the position of the wounded—subjected to these violent, destructive criminals, making him afraid. And if President Biden himself can place himself in the position of the afraid, then his address is galvanizing a group driven by fear.
In Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, Harper describes the hypocritical colleges who, while exploiting their protest-filled pasts as selling points, punish the students who dare to contribute to that otherwise venerated legacy of activism. Could this response also come back to fear? The protestors are demanding the college, for example, divest from companies that supply weapons to the Israeli army, something that makes the college look “bad.” Colleges are afraid to look bad so they create a “fantasy of violation” (Ahmed, 118) where they are the victim and the protestors are demonized and aggressive and must be gotten rid of. College administrators spread fear, while also justifying their vilification of the protestors as an act of love for the college. This is precisely what Sara Ahmed describes in her opening example about the white supremacist group who justify their hatred of immigrants and people of color as emerging from love for America. This weaponization of emotion is at play in the response to protests at colleges across the US. Guilt is driving colleges to punish the protesters, and Biden (an example to many other leaders) is spreading a false narrative about the situation in order to instill fear in the public. Fear and guilt both feed into a hateful narrative that frames the students as “other”, as objects of fear, and victimizes administrators, government leaders, and the public in order to unify them to act against the students. It is easy to see the situation as an “affective economy”, one where, as Ahmed writes, “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities — or bodily space with social space — through the very intensity of their attachments.” (Ahmed, 118). Emotions work so well at forming communities and motivating public opinion and political action because they are not stagnant or private, they do not reside within an object or person, and it is their constant and infinite movement that allows them to shape our societies so fully.
Recent student protests against the war in Gaza have been met with repeated police violence, often condoned and even ordered by college administrators. Despite this violent response, the protests have been mostly peaceful—yet colleges, the media, and President Biden have all called the protestors “violent”. By making the public frightened of these students, the government intends to distract people from the cause these student protesters are fighting for and to justify the violence used against the students. I have applied Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Affective Economies” to an analysis of the response to the protests, and explored the ways in which emotions like hatred and fear are manipulated to unify groups against a perceived other, and how emotions’ ability to bind usually disparate subjects together in narratives is essential to this process. Ahmed’s theories about affective economies are crucial to understanding the violent response to student protests, and the essential role that emotions, hate and fear specifically, played in this response. Ahmed’s work removes emotions from the private sphere where they never fully existed in the first place and re-contextualizes them as the driving force behind society’s movements, and while that can help us see understand this particular situation more clearly—it also presents a way of using Ahmed’s work to better understand a diverse array of social situations and movements.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies”. Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 117-13, Duke University Press, 2004.
Harper, Tyler Austin. “America’s Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed.” The Atlantic.
2 May 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/college-activism-hypocrisy/678262/
Biden, Joseph. “Remarks by President Biden on Recent Events on College Campuses”.
The White House, speeches and remarks. 2 May 2024. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/05/02/remarks-by-president-biden-on-recent-events-on-college-campuses/
El-Bawab, Nadine. “How pro-Palestinian protests unfolded on college campuses across the USA: A timeline.” ABC News. 4 May 2024. https://abcnews.go.com/US/pro-palestinian-protests-unfolded-college-campuses-us-timeline/story?id=109902300
Haberkorn, Jennifer, and Lemire, Jonathan. “Why Biden Finally Decided to Speak Out On college Protest Violence.” Politico. 3 May 2024. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/03/biden-college-protest-violence-00156111
Gabbatt, Adam, and Helmore, Edward. “Democrats Rally to Biden’s Defense Over Response to Pro-Palestinian Student Protests.” The Guardian. 5 May 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/05/democrats-biden-pro-palestinian-student-protests
Sprockets and Springes 