The banana and the chickpea

As the Banana Girl, I was thrilled when the Princeton Committee on Palestine told me that they wanted to start a hummus campaign, not because I agreed with their arguments against Sabra (I am still not sure what I think of them), but because I am a strong proponent of conscious consumerism. In my opinion, our dollars are our votes in a capitalist system. If we want change, we should not just lobby for it. We should spend for it too. PCP’s campaign represented an opportunity to ask consumers to pause once again and consider the impact of their purchasing habits.

Two weeks ago, Princeton undergraduates finally voted on the hummus referendum. It failed by a vote of 1,014 to 699.

I think that students voted against the hummus referendum because PCP made two mistakes:

First, it let the referendum turn into a political question instead of a moral one. “Yes” votes became votes for Palestine, and “No” votes became votes for Israel. PCP would have been more effective if they had allied with Tigers for Israel and framed the referendum as a condemnation of all human rights abuses in the Middle East — an idea that sounds crazy, but actually could have worked. I tried it when I developed a partnership with Dining Services at the beginning of the banana campaign, and it resulted in Dining Services becoming my strongest ally instead of my strongest enemy. PCP and TFI might not have gotten along as well as Dining Services and I did, and PCP might have had to make compromises about its message, but it probably would have won more votes, and the campus’s dialogue about consumer choice would have been richer.

Second, PCP members behaved like activists. They used words like “boycott,” which one peer told me was extremely offensive, and printed posters with images of hummus containers covered with big red X’s.

Princeton students, by and large, have a knee-jerk distrust of activism. I sometimes joke that we are unwilling to fight the proverbial man because we want to become him. During the banana campaign, I managed to avoid getting too much flak for being an activist by hyping my campaign’s intellectualism. I wrote a report about Princeton’s banana companies that I submitted to Dining Services and cited in interviews, and I printed citations on all of my posters.

I find it funny that a campus of so many highly intelligent people is so weary of activism. Since we spend most of our time thinking, I would expect more of us to publically take on strong opinions.

I think that we do not support activist movements because we want to seem rational, and activism seems too biased and emotional. Unfortunately, our effort to appear rational leads us to draw irrational conclusions about activism, to disdain a word like “boycott” even though it is not inherently insulting — it only means a call for a change in purchasing habits. Princeton’s irrational rationalism came into play during the banana campaign when I was accused of being a left-wing socialist nut because I talked about workers’ rights. Two kind commenters on The Daily Princetonian’s website called me “this Haley White character” and “Haley ‘Che’ White.” Bear in mind that my campaign asked students to use capitalism to lobby for social change, just as they already used capitalism to convince automobile companies to build more red cars and Apple to increase production of iPods.

By being unwelcome to activism, we discourage a valuable social practice, one that anyone of any political persuasion or social class can use to spark discussion about any issue that worries him or her. We should be more permissive of it at an intellectual institution like Princeton.

Having critiqued PCP, I must admit that it had one accomplishment that I was never able to achieve. It attracted international press attention, which meant that they got more people to think about Sabra’s chickpeas than I ever got to contemplate Chiquita’s bananas. Kudos, guys, for making it all the way to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Haley White is a Wilson School major from Chatham, N.J. She can be reached at hewhite@princeton.edu.