Roughly 60 students campaigned on Monday against online comments posted on a Daily Princetonian article about the Dec. 5 fight at the Fields Center, said Andrea Clay '11, who is co-president of the Princeton Association of Black Women and helped organize the campaign.
The students spray-painted T-shirts with excerpts from some of the comments: “moves in packs,” “prone to violence” and “less deserving candidate.” Several students said they found the excerpts, which reference people involved in the fight, to be “racist” and “ignorant.”
“I don’t mean this in a racist way at all,” began one post by an anonymous commenter identified as “11,” “I just think that given the propensity of many Blacks and Hispanics to move in packs and carry weapons, there should be more police at these events.”
The T-shirt campaign was part of an effort to raise awareness of ignorance on campus, said Jonathan Ford Jr. ’12, the president of the Black Men’s Awareness Group and one of the event’s organizers.
“You should be able to read a forum … and still feel comfortable, still feel accepted,” he said last night in an interview with the ‘Prince.’
“I felt like it was the type of thing where we could unify a number of different students against something that shouldn’t happen,” added Ford, who was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt with “prone to violence” stenciled in black on the front.
The campaign, organized last week by several student groups on campus, aimed to “promote understanding and dispel ignorance in the student body as a whole,” said Tyrell Hall ’12, the treasurer of the Black Men’s Awareness Group.
The controversy has raised new questions about how comments should be regulated online, if at all.
The comments by “11” and others that were deemed offensive by some are still online because they are part of an online conversation that should not be censored, said Matt Westmoreland ’10, editor-in-chief of the ‘Prince.’
“One of the ‘Prince’s’ primary responsibilities [is] to foster dialogue and to serve as a forum for debate on campus, and I think that’s a service the comment feature serves very well,” Westmoreland said.
“There are certain comments that I do think do not have a place on the website,” he added. “Those are comments that are egregiously inappropriate against either the writer or the person or the subject matter that’s being discussed in a story.”
Several student leaders involved in the T-shirt campaign said they agreed with the decision not to remove the comments on the Dec. 7 article.
“I do not believe that they should be removed, because in a way they serve as a historical record: a record of how people thought, what they thought and, in some cases, why they thought or said the things they said,” said Reginald Galloway ’11, the president of Sustained Dialogue. He wore a shirt Monday that read “less deserving candidate.”
The fact that the comments are in public “gives us a forum” to address issues of race that might not have been apparent if the comments were removed, said Muhsin Hassan ’12, the vice president of the Muslim Students Association and a participant in the campaign.
“I don’t think you should censor what people say,” he added.
As of Monday evening, the article had 144 reader comments.
In the end, Monday’s T-shirt campaign was focused on raising awareness about some of the comments, organizers said.
“We’re not trying to attack or to protest. We’re trying to spread awareness and spread love,” Ford said.
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