Rainbow Nooses Cause Uproar on Tennessee Campus

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/austin-peay-state-rainbow-nooses.html

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An art student hung six nooses, each a different color of the rainbow, from a tree at a university in Tennessee on Monday as part of a class project, the school said, provoking an uproar among students and staff members who saw them as a symbol of racism and homophobia evocative of the Ku Klux Klan.

Passers-by found the colorful nooses hanging in a row — purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red — from a tree branch high above the sidewalk in front of a fine arts building at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., at around 5 p.m. on Monday, the university said.

They were quickly removed by campus police, but it was not until Tuesday that the administration said in a statement that the nooses had been part of an art project. The school declined to name the student who put them up.

“This is a lesson for everyone about sensitivity and respect for all people and how inclusive and understanding we need to be as a campus community,” said Alisa White, the university president, in a statement on Tuesday. “While we support the freedom of expression on our campus, we also have to keep in mind that there are symbols that have very specific and negative meanings to everyone, especially if context is not provided.”

The university said in a statement on Tuesday that the student did not intend for the project to have anything to do with race or sexuality. It said she had been “sincerely concerned about the perception of and reaction to the display” and supported the decision to remove them, as did her professor.

Barry Jones, the chairman of the university’s department of art and design, said the student made the nooses for an introductory class on outdoor crochet sculpture. She wanted to do a project “about cycles of life and death and, in particular, how that relates to the arrival of spring,” he said.

She used rainbow colored yarn because it was “bright and spring-like,” Mr. Jones said, and she wove them into nooses, which were covered in crocheted flowers, because she thought it symbolized death.

“I understand the outrage completely, and it was obviously a huge mistake by the student to not recognize how a symbol so associated with hate and racism cannot be co-opted to talk about other things,” he said. “In the end it was a really tone-deaf student.”

The nooses were hung without any explanation that they were an art project and without any statement about their meaning, the university said. That omission deepened the confusion and anguish around their sudden appearance, re-opening longstanding racial wounds and inflaming anxieties about prejudice, exclusion and violence.

“These ropes might not have a malicious meaning but it still sent the wrong message,” Alexis Fuller, a student at Austin Peay, wrote as part of an online debate on the school’s Facebook page. “We all know what ropes hanging from a tree mean.”

Students and staff members met on Tuesday in a campus ballroom to discuss the incident. In a statement, the administration said the student’s professor had not been aware of what she was doing, but Mr. Jones described that assertion as “not 100 percent” accurate. He said the student had proposed the project to her professor and was cautioned against doing it.

“The professor explained that it would be kind of a charged image and the student went ahead anyway,” Mr. Jones said. “They talked about the noose as a symbol.”

A picture of the nooses was posted to Instagram on Monday by the university’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Attempts to reach the state, regional and university chapters of the group on Tuesday were unsuccessful.

Chris Sanders, the executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, an L.G.B.T. rights group, said “it would not surprise” him if the nooses had been meant as a threat to the local L.G.B.T. community. But he said his “primary concern” was the effect on African-American students and staff members.

“It wasn’t that long ago in our country’s history where African-Americans were lynched, so this is a troubling signal of danger and unacceptance whenever it appears,” he said.

“Some people forget, and that’s why teaching history, especially the hard parts of history, is so important,” he added. ”People can unintentionally use these images and not realize all the horror, terrorism and pain they include.”