Kiera McGuire
Managing Editor
On Monday, Jan. 19, The College of Wooster celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with faculty-led Justice Dialogues on topics surrounding justice, freedom and inclusion. Evan Riley, associate professor of philosophy, led a discussion titled “Thinking with King in a Time of Monsters,” discussing the current U.S. administration, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and how communities can come together in the current political climate.
To open the discussion, Riley welcomed Ian Burns, an organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Wooster, to share a few words about DSA’s mission and the ICE protest that happened outside of Lowry on Tuesday, Jan. 20. “As we speak right now, Trump is organizing 1,500 federal troops out of Alaska to send into Minneapolis, which means he will most likely be using the Insurrection Act this week,” Burns said. “That is a fundamental breaking of our constitution.” Burns also announced the general strike that happened on Friday, Jan. 23 in Minneapolis, which halted the economic flow of the city.
Before diving into his agenda for the day, Riley posed the question: “How exactly should we honor King today?,” clarifying that “today” meant the weeks and months to follow. A large focus of Riley’s presentation was characterizing King not only as an activist, but as a philosopher. “Academic philosophy, as many of you know, is a discipline that is primarily white and primarily [filled with] men,” Riley began. “It’s a fair piece of history to say that King has not really received his due in the pages of Anglo-American academic political philosophy. We should be a bit suspicious of philosophy, in that sense.”
Riley’s presentation featured three distinct points, but he wanted an open discussion between himself and the audience. The first section of his presentation focused on quotes from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political philosopher who was imprisoned under the Mussolini regime. The current political landscape, according to Riley, is filled with monsters as the country is caught between two orders, or in an “interregnum.” In his presentation, he talked about sources of power, examples of which included university presidents and legacy media outlets. “A lot of sources of soft or social power are cowards … their actions reveal that there is a kind of crisis of belief, faith and shared political culture that’s going on at the same time.”
In defining “monsters,” Riley pointed to the Oxford dictionary definition and related it to modern figures. “The monsters are a deviance from social norms — a perversion from what we might think of as natural or written law,” Riley said. “I want to say that Trump is monstrous in this way.”
Riley also pointed to beliefs about ethical and moral life in relation to the current administration. In describing functional versus failing social order, Riley framed it as “rational people being constrained by other people’s wellbeing and recognizing other people’s wellbeing as constraining their behavior. When you have this kind of crisis where social order is being suspended, then you’re going to see individual monstrous actions.”
Some of the audience members raised questions if the current political climate is drastically different from the past. To respond, Riley stated that his argument is “a matter of degree, and we’re in a particularly extreme moment worth noticing.” Riley also said that “if the crisis is super serious, that’s what matters.”
The second topic of Riley’s presentation revolved around quotes from King’s writing, mentioning that some of his works were “occasionally neglected.” The main idea of this section was framing how King’s thinking could help guide residents of the U.S. during the Trump administration. One quote that Riley drew attention to stated: “The fact is that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed — that’s the long, sometimes tragic and turbulent story of history.” King’s political activism, according to Riley, was aligned with pacifist philosophy and the question of moral dilemmas.
In this section, Riley devoted time to talk about Renée Good, who was shot and killed on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. “I think anyone who’s seen the video knows that that was out-and-out murder,” Riley said. To relate to the earlier discussion of moral dilemmas, Riley presented two different dilemmas that contradicted one another. According to the handout from the presentation, “One might think one should not act either in such a way as to likely allow one’s own death at the hands of an unjust would-be murderer, nor in such a way as to risk grievous bodily harm to another human being.” According to Riley, King believed that the definition of pacifism “has a tendency to be blind to this kind of thing, and that this kind of thing is unfortunately very real.”
The presentation ended with a discussion on collective justice, with students, faculty and community members sharing ways communities can unify –– specifically, how college students can resist the Trump administration without damaging their academic standing. Some solutions mentioned included attending city council meetings, creating a political culture on campus, talking with professors and boycotting companies that support institutions that don’t align with their individual beliefs.