ScreamOfTheNight, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On April 24, 2024, the South Lawn of the University of Texas (UT) at Austin became a battleground. What began as a peaceful student demonstration in solidarity with Palestine quickly descended into violence, not from protesters but from the state itself. I was on the front lines as state troopers in riot gear stormed into the crowd, arresting and zip-tying students by the dozen, shoving bystanders to the ground and turning the lawn of our University into a militarized zone. 

Days later, on April 29, again I saw firsthand the violence escalate: students were kettled, beaten and dragged across their campus in handcuffs. Personally, I faced two flashbang grenades being deployed against myself and my peers by state forces. More than 130 arrests were made in those two days. I can still hear the thud of batons against bodies, the chants drowning out rough orders, the moment when free speech was replaced with fear and violence.

This is what “polarization” looks like at UT, not abstract hostility between peers, but the lived fracture of a community when those in power unleash repression against those demanding justice. As Frantz Fanon wrote in “Wretched of the Earth”, “We revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe.” On the South Lawn, we could no longer breathe, not under the weight of complicity in genocide, nor under the suffocating contradiction of a University that extols “freedom” while criminalizing dissent. Yet, this clarity is exactly what polarization produces. Polarization deepens when trust in institutions collapses, and trust collapses when UT accepts millions from oil corporations while warning students of climate catastrophe, when it celebrates “What starts here changes the world” even as it silences voices that dare speak for Palestine and for the divestiture of our University funds from the war machine, when it asks undocumented students to believe they belong while failing to defend them from hostile state policy.

Some insist that unity should prevail over conflict, however, democracy does not thrive in false consensus, it demands the honest contestation of irreconcilable differences. Paulo Freire warned in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” that education “either functions as an instrument … (to) bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom.” To choose the latter, students and faculty must be willing to rupture, to polarize, to refuse neutrality in the face of injustice.

Polarization at UT is not the death of dialogue, it is the pedagogy of strife for true freedom and justice. It has sharpened in the chants for Palestine, the demands of graduate workers for fair wages, the persistence of immigrant students in the face of erasure, the courage of climate activists who refuse to let our future be forfeited to oil.

If April 2024 taught us anything, it is that neutrality is impossible when the state wields batons against students. Polarization does not divide us needlessly; it clarifies the sides history has already drawn. And history will not remember those who kept their peace, it will remember those who stood, even when the batons fell. The grass of the South Lawn still bears the imprint of boots, bodies and blood, a reminder that the struggle for truth and justice will not be erased, no matter how violently suppressed.

Arshia Papari is a Government junior at UT and a Green Party candidate for Texas State Representative in House District 49.

Originally published by The Daily Texan
October 30, 2025