Glass Idols
By Qahnaarin
“For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil will not sojourn with you. The boastful will not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies
The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful.”
Psalms 5:4-6
In Genesis 9, we see God restoring His covenant with Noah after flooding the entire planet. This covenant is brought out of the need for new boundaries between the righteous Noah and God given the unprecedented events prior. God promises that he shall never flood the Earth again and tells Noah to reproduce, along with the animals, while setting some conditions for permissible behavior. Consistent boundaries like these allow for ample communication and advancement of the narrative in The Bible. Sadly though, unlike the Abrahamic God that so many of our administrators claim to follow, UNC admin has never given our student leaders any such thing. When I say covenant, I am not referring to pages of procedure that just lead to a special committee deciding to ban student organizations, I mean simple rules of engagement for what is permissible. I came to this revelation after bearing witness to the events at the Board of Governors (BoG) meeting where two students were violently arrested and several others removed. This is a personal account, and I would encourage further reading of the work done at WUNC by Brianna Atkinson for how this vote went down1, along with the work from Julian Taylor at the Triangle Blog Blog2 for a holistic view of how this vote came about and what transpired.
The timeline:
9:24 am I was outside the building for the meeting. It is important to note that this building is privately owned. It houses a public entity but that does not make it public. This means there is a private buffer between the BoG and students. At this point, I was expecting this encounter to be rather lax. It was a Board of Governors meeting, not the Death Star. I would soon discover that this assumption was naive.
9:38 am Within just a few minutes of being inside the private lobby, the building asked us to leave and the BoG provided us with QR codes to “join” the meeting virtually. It seemed evident to me that the purpose of including students is not just to receive information, but to physically be present in the meeting space. This meeting was called to approve a decision made by the UNC Board of Trustees to reallocate all funds previously invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming to campus police and public safety. This is something students cared so much about that they rallied during the summer. Meanwhile, administrators cared so little they left us outside the meeting in a privately owned lobby.
9:49 am A few students, who I understand to be Student Government leaders at their respective schools were let in, but all other students were denied entry.
10:04 am This is around the time arrests began. Police gathered and detained someone who they later released, and arrested two students. I am not aware of the current status of these students. There are also videos that corroborate these arrests from reputable sources like the Niner Times, along with the brutality of the methods used on students.
10:34 am I decided to go to the detention center, joining a community jail support effort, to meet the arrested as they exited the building.
10: 49: Upon arriving at the detention center, the entrance was blocked. The officer who was guarding the entrance (and later opened it) explained that there were past protesters who did burnouts, where a car purposely “burnouts” their wheels which makes noise, and they thought we were somehow affiliated with them. At this point, I stayed at the detention center until the students were released and went home. I took the day off work because I thought my presence at this meeting would be important. My day quickly morphed into supporting the victims of state violence and movement repression instead. I was originally intending to write a piece about the legal precedent for such a move. After all, one would think using a private buffer to get rid of protesters at a public meeting space must be illegal in some way. I instead discovered that our administrators’ choice of a private venue has brought about new forms of exclusion from public meetings that are completely legal. There is no legal precedent because this style of architecture, often used by gentrifiers who want a buffer between them and the city, has not been around for long. It is impossible to have a covenant when the engagements are done in unprecedented, intentionally deceitful, ways. I, along with other students, simply did not have the information necessary to prepare for that event, as common assumptions of accessibility of public meetings seem to not apply to the BoG.
We are not being watched over by people who obey the word of God. I know this because they fail to make covenants with their subordinates. I know this because Jesus preaches humility (Matthew 5:5), and yet our system now believes it doesn’t need to heed minority voices with the removal of DEI. I know this because Jesus said he even preached “love for your enemy” (Matthew 5:44). And I know this for certain because our leaders prioritize financial gains and optics instead of student welfare and equity. The carefully appointed political leaders at UNC-Chapel Hill were not appointed by divine intervention, but by other mortals who wished to seek glory for themselves (Matthew 6:1)
I do not see any trace of a loving God in the actions taken by the BoG when they struck down DEI, and from people who see a prison cell as the best place for a concerned student.
The God depicted in the Bible also actively tries to liberate his people. Whether it be Egyptians or Romans, God is placed antithetical to the oppressive governments. It is foundationally incorrect to the narrative in the Bible to associate God with any institution that dominates others. The Romans (Luke 22-24) relied on the same mob tactics to crucify Jesus that our politicians use to strip DEI, and yet many of these leaders call themselves Christians. They ought to be people who know just how destructive and futile government encroachment is. Instead, they choose to wield their power like the very false prophets Jesus warned against (Matthew 7:15-20) where he likened them to bad trees. The “fruit” from them, Lee and Bo(G/T) alike, is sour and rotten to the core.
This is particularly disappointing given Lee’s familial history. His grandparents, Lindy & Hale Boggs, were both Democrats in the House of Representatives3. (and while their voting record does not inspire confidence) His grandma was the first woman to preside over a national convention4. She was also an ambassador to the Holy See5 (the Catholic leadership) and was even granted a Laerate Medal,6 the highest honor an American Catholic can receive. Lee himself also attended Georgetown for his JD7, continuing with Catholicism as his family did. It is just plain sad to see Lee drag his family legacy, which once used its public service to get women into positions of power, to being something that would slide back progress on DEI to appease his conservative funders.
Lee, his handlers, The Bo(G/T), and the conservative agenda that got them all there worship at the altar of a God that would’ve smote them in another life; I see no God in the UNC System that lives from these people and their “leadership.”
1 https://www.wunc.org/2024-05-23/unc-bog-vote-eliminate-dei-policy
2 https://triangleblogblog.com/2024/05/22/opinion-uncs-political-statement-on-dei/
3 https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/10/congressional-cemetery-the-boggs-family/
4 https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/milestones-women-american-politics
5 https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/boggs
6 https://laetare.nd.edu/recipients/#info1991
7 https://www.unc.edu/posts/2023/12/15/former-state-budget-director-named-interim-chancellor/
