April 26, 2007

Kazim Ali is an assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

On the afternoon of April 19, he took a box of old poetry submissions that he had evaluated and put them in his white Volkswagen beetle that bears a faculty insignia and still has a “Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America” sticker on it. He drove up to Wright Hall on campus and placed the box next to a trashcan, which is how he has disposed of papers in the past.

“A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away,” he says on his website, www.kazimali.com. “Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent . . . had just placed a box next to the trash can.”

Almost immediately, the campus went into lockdown.

“Campus authorities alerted the state police bomb squad, evacuated buildings, and cordoned off the area,” according to the local newspaper, The Sentinel.

Ali says he didn’t find out about the lockdown until he checked his e-mail about an hour and a half later. He had received an e-mail from the administration about a suspicious package in front of Wright Hall, which is where he dropped his box of poems.

“Oh my god, I think that’s my box,” he thought to himself. And then he e-mailed everyone he could to try to allay their fears, he tells The Progressive.

One of his colleagues, who had figured out that the box was his, approached the police to tell them the box belonged to a professor on campus.

“What country is he from?” the police officer asked her, according to Ali.

“At some length, several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone, where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled,” Ali says on his website.

After that, the lockdown was called off.

On his website, Ali explains his anger at what happened.

“The man in the parking lot didn’t even see me,” he writes. “He saw my darkness.”

“I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me,” he adds. “Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.”

The campus was shut down, he writes, “not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us safe.”

In this climate, he remains worried.

“I’m most concerned for other faculty of color and students of color on this campus and on any campus,” he tells The Progressive. “The atmosphere is really tense right now, and there is a cultivation of that tenseness. We’ve been living in this crazy crucible for six years now. We need to ask, do we want to live this way?”

Dr. Peter Gigliotti, executive director for communication and marketing for Shippensburg University, is reluctant to discuss the incident, not even confirming the identity of Kazim Ali.

“The university did not and will not identify the person because we think it was an honest mistake, and we’re not identifying anybody involved. The university acted appropriately under the circumstances, and there is nothing else for us to say.”

A call to the campus police was not returned.

On his website, Ali has several of his own poems. One, called “Passage,” contains a phrase about someone “trying on the oppressor coat.”