Tessa Majors and the Worst Thing I Ever Heard

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/opinion/tessa-majors-barnard.html

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I wasn’t expecting to get any messages on my answering machine at Barnard College on Christmas Day. But there was one. So I hit play, thinking it might be greetings from an old friend, or even a stranger, wishing to share the good will of the season.

What I heard instead was a racist message from a white supremacist group in Idaho, using the incomprehensibly tragic death of a first-year Barnard student, Tessa Majors, as an occasion to promote hatred toward African-Americans. She had been fatally stabbed during a mugging on Dec. 11, not far from campus. It was one of the most awful things I’ve ever heard.

A few days earlier, at a celebration of Ms. Major’s life in Charlottesville, Va., her hometown, a friend had described her as someone who “tethered communities who didn’t speak to one another because she thought we were all worth knowing.”

At that same celebration, a group of her friends performed several of her favorite songs. They also played Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” a song that contains the lyric, “Losing love is like a window in your heart; everybody sees you’re blown apart; everybody sees the wind blow.”

I did not know Ms. Majors, but I’m proud to be a teacher at Barnard. It will take a long time for our community to heal; in some ways, we never will.

When I got the racist robocall, I deleted it instantly. My hope was to erase it from my memory, from my life, from the world I live in.

But I should have known it’s never that easy. I can still hear that man’s voice. The more I try to forget it, the more it haunts me.

Since then, I’ve been trying to understand, without much success, what the right response to hate should be. It’s not the first time I’ve heard voices like this, or wrestled with this question.

When I was young, I was ridiculed and beaten more than once for being queer. As a public advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. people, I’ve gotten used to threatening letters and being accosted in public. Last year, in response to something I’d written in The Times, someone came up to me on the street in Midtown Manhattan and began to yell and swear.

“So much death,” laments King Theoden in Tolkien’s “The Two Towers.” The question he asks next is one that I too struggle to answer, “What can men do against such reckless hate?” Because it’s just not possible to “delete messages” for every terrible thing the world contains.

Sometimes I think about John Lennon’s sweet song “Across the Universe” and its refrain, “Nothing’s going to change my world.” It’s a strangely transcendent lyric, but when I hear it now, the words sometimes make me sad, given that Lennon’s world was indeed changed by a deranged young man with a .38 Special.

Often that’s been my first response to hate — to obstinately declare that my sense of the world cannot be changed, even by violence. Sometimes, this means insulating myself from obscenities, as when I deleted that racist voice mail. That can be a good strategy for self-care.

Other times, I fear it means putting my head in the sand, denying the very reality of the terrible things that hatred has brought about.

An even worse response — which I’m also guilty of — is to answer hate with hate. On Twitter, for example, I’m hardly generous, especially when it comes to responding to people who think it’s clever to diminish my humanity. Am I embarrassed by some of the things I’ve tweeted — and written — in the heat of the moment? Yes.

Of course, fighting back is only natural when people attack you. A better response would be to try to open hearts. There are many ways of going about this, including getting involved in communities that seek to illuminate the human spirit, communities like Barnard.

Another thing we can do is to gather together in defiance of the darkness. On Sunday, tens of thousands of New Yorkers did just that, at a rally against anti-Semitism. Events such as these can bring about the very thing Tessa Majors tried to do in her short life — the tethering of one soul to another.

Perhaps the best antidotes to hatred are the tiny acts of grace we can perform each day, actions as simple as listening to each other, trying to understand. I would like to believe it’s possible to act with compassion and wisdom, even when our hearts feel broken.

Aeschylus, in his play “Agamemnon,” wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

I have spent a lot of time this last decade thinking about hate, about the pain which cannot forget — feeling it fall upon my heart, and upon the hearts of those I love.

This past December I thought about Tessa Majors and all the songs she never got to sing. And the line from the song that her friends sang at the celebration of her life: “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.”

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