On Sept. 18, over 100 pro-Palestine students, faculty and staff shut down a career fair at Statler Hall attended by defense contractors Boeing and L3Harris, two of the 10 companies directly named in the divestment referendum passed by Cornell undergraduate students last spring. Following a walkout organized by the student-led Coalition for Mutual Liberation, protesters disrupted the career fair through noise and chants, including “F*ck you, Boeing.” While I did not attend the protest, I co-sign their sentiment and support the student mandate to support a ceasefire in Gaza and divest from weapons manufacturers that support the ongoing war in Gaza. When it comes to Boeing, it’s personal.
One of my uncles worked for Lockheed for 50 years, and another uncle was a country director for Pan American World Airlines. Pan Am also brought my parents together; they met when my father served as Pan Am’s airport manager in Taipei, Taiwan, and my mother worked as his assistant. Our loyalty to the air industry includes an enduring identification with Boeing. After all, Pan Am and Boeing collaborated on multiple long-haul planes and are most well known for their development of the first jumbo jet, Boeing’s 747. My dad often explained why the 747 was the best plane in the world, and my childhood memories include playing with my prized inflatable toy Pan American Boeing 747, its iconic blue globe printed on the tail.
There is another way to situate my personal and familial nostalgia, one that takes into account larger historical forces. My parents worked for Pan Am in the backdrop to the Vietnam War, as part of Taiwan’s development as a major transit site bringing U.S. soldiers to serve their tours of duty. Pan Am operated R&R, or rest and relaxation, flights during the Vietnam War, creating the infrastructure for sex tourism throughout Asia after the war. My own story is embedded within what scholars have termed the military industrial complex, and the attendant profits made from gendered and colonial violence. For Boeing’s part, its B-52 bombers were instrumental in nearly 114,000 U.S. combat missions in Vietnam, and Boeing would greatly expand its weapons manufacturing in the years following. Today, the majority of Boeing’s profits come from its defense contracts.I offer this reassessment of my family’s story because this is what critical inquiry demands of us and what, I believe, we aim to teach our students, to consider knowledge within larger systems of power, even and especially when we are complicit in said structures.
In their letter to Cornellians regarding the career fair action and in multiple utterances since, the president and provost characterize the protest as “involv[ing] violence” and protesters as “violent.” They describe “intentionally menacing” protestors who “screamed into bullhorns,” “banged cymbals, pots, and pans,” and “shouted profanity.” The president and provost attempt to construct violence through their use of alarmist and hyperbolic language, when in fact none of the actions they depict are actually violent or criminal. If their letter was written in an FWS course, I would most certainly ask them for a revision; in the parlance of our profession, they have failed to substantiate their argument.
There is a reason that protest is called civil disobedience. The protesters were boisterous, loud and created chaos by banging pots and pans. Profane, crass and disruptive the protest may have been; violent it was not. Even the allegation that some protestors “push[ed] aside” CUPD officers is relatively benign, which might be why the language of pushing past has become elevated to shoving and forcible entry by the president and provost in their communications. Stating that someone is criminal without evidence does not make them criminal, but it does constitute criminalization. Given the international and immigrant students; given the Black, Brown, Arab and Asian students; given the Indigenous students who have received temporary suspensions last spring and this semester, we cannot continue to ignore the racism underlying such fear-mongering rhetoric such as “intentionally menacing,” or the use of terms such as “repeat offender,” “assault” and “sexual predation” when discussing temporary suspensions of student activists.
The language and tactics of the administration would be ridiculous were they not so dangerous. Not only does the administration’s rhetorical construction of violence for nonviolent civil disobedience provide pretext for their broad suspension powers under the Interim Expressive Activity Policy, but it also obfuscates the real and actual violence at hand, which brings us back to Boeing. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, as of Oct. 9 of this year, over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, over 99,000 have been injured and approximately 10,000 are missing. This unprecedented level of death and destruction in Gaza relies on defense contractors such as Boeing. The company is the fourth largest U.S. defense contractor, and Boeing sends more weapons to Israel than any other manufacturer in the world. Boeing’s F-15 fighter jets and its inappropriately named Apache helicopters are indispensable to Israeli Air Force attacks on Gaza. Amnesty International reports that Boeing-produced Joint Direct Attack Munitions were used in two unlawful Israeli air strikes that killed 43 civilians in central Gaza. Evidence shows that Boeing’s GBU-39 small diameter bombs were used in an airstrike on unprotected tents in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, starting a fire that killed at least 46 people and injured 240. SDB bombs have been implicated in additional attacks on residential buildings and at least three schools housing displaced persons.
Cornell administrators would have us believe that pro-Palestine protestors on this campus are violent; this is deeply insulting given the abhorrent large-scale violence that students, staff and faculty are attempting to confront. Though profanity seems woefully insufficient, f*ck Boeing. I’m done being complicit in the violence of war and genocide. I support our students and their ethical and moral vision: divest now.
Juliana Hu Pegues is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English. They can be reached at [email protected].