By now almost everyone knows that the highly disputed referendum proposed by the Students for a Democratic Society to remove Eppes Statue that sits adjacent to Westcott did not pass. The polarizing detail that got this question placed on the 2016 Fall SGA ballot in the first place was the fact that the founder of this institution also owned slaves and the money he used to construct this university was probably at the expense of many African American lives. I will not lie, when the issue-- that seemingly erupted overnight-- was first introduced to me, I found it arbitrary. He founded the university, he has a statue, but he owns slaves. Who in the south didn’t? What was the real problem? But I had to think about this issue for more than just a nanosecond for it to make sense. I had to put it into context for just a minute to see why this was an issue for part of our community here at FSU. Maybe this was about more than just a statue.
Hint: it isn’t about a statue at all.
Florida State University has given me some of the best experiences of my life and for that, I am extremely grateful; I don’t want anything I say to negate that fact, but there are some other issues at play here that cannot be ignored. Coming from an extremely diverse city in South Florida, Tallahassee can be a little bit of a culture shock. The culture here is very Southern, which at times is one of my favorite things about Tallahassee, but sometimes it’s a nail in my tire, slowly pulling the air from within me that I need to survive. If you peel back a few layers underneath the Southern charm, there is something else. A gross underbelly of the that still exists and thrives in the attitudes of the privileged here today. It’s in the subtle moments when people look down their nose at you when you enter certain stores. It’s in the separation between “Urban Nights” and “FSU” nights at the clubs sprinkled around Tallahassee. It’s in the way we scornfully call FAMU “the school across the tracks.” It shows up when you can’t relate to your classmates because you have experiences and cultural differences that disconnect you; but you can’t share them because you are exactly one of your kind in your class. It’s in the way my friends of Indian descent tell me they were greeted with “Ni Hao” on their homecoming float. It rears it’s head when students protest that a certain group of people’s live matter too and people are immediately offended without ever stopping to think about why. It’s in the estrangement between MGC’s and the PanHellenic and IFC communities. It’s there. In those places. But also in about a million other sites of microagression and partiality.
It’s a group of people silently screaming we are here too! We occupy the same space. Our thoughts, feelings, and emotions matter, too. We want to be seen, we want to be valued. It’s not the statute at all; it’s the whole notion of the statue. It’s the veneration of Southern ideals deep rooted in issues of intolerance and hate. It's walking past a piece of bronze that reminds you every day that this man could have looked at me or my friends and thought of us as property instead of people. It’s the idea that people can still think of you that way. But we don’t need validation. We want change. We want to feel like we earned our space here, like our screams are not being shot into a void.
I believe we can and will overcome this small piece of Florida State history. We will walk by the statue and remember that the descendants of the property Eppes once bought, now occupy the famous property he established. So keep the statue. We are not here to win a battle; we are here to win a war.
