Opinion: Amherst’s Politics of Endless Outrage

By Rizwana Khan

The first meeting of the new four-part series, Community Wellness and Resiliency Conversations, felt like a group project in which everyone had done the reading and mastered the vocabulary — systemic oppression, community accountability, and the rest — with graduate seminar precision. The challenge was figuring out what to do with it all.

The values are publicly displayed from front porches, faculty offices, coffee shops, and town buildings. The lawn signs are immaculate, the mission statements polished, but the meetings are not.

At the beginning of the meeting, I raised an issue that I thought deserved attention: Islamophobia and an incident involving a friend’s car being keyed while parked downtown. Instead, it landed with the force of a leaf falling into the Connecticut River.

I expected at least some discussion — a question, a follow-up, or an acknowledgment that anti-Muslim bias, like other forms of prejudice, affects people’s sense of belonging and safety within the community.

Instead, the discussion immediately shifted to the anonymous hateful flyer that was distributed in Amherst on April 29, then to questions about why there had not been more media coverage, then to concerns about the town manager’s response, and then to why Pamela Young and Camille Theriaque had signed the follow-up letter.

The conversation kept moving, but always within the same orbit. Certain voices dominated, and their grievances occupied all available oxygen. And just like that, Islamophobia disappeared.

It simply vanished beneath the weight of other priorities. That moment stayed with me because it revealed something larger about public discourse.

What Was Missed
Communities often speak about inclusion as though it were a universal principle, but in practice, attention is finite. Not every concern receives equal urgency, nor does every experience receive equal recognition. Some issues immediately command the room. Others struggle to gain a foothold before the conversation moves on.

The irony was hard to miss. A meeting devoted to discussing exclusion ended up reproducing its own form of exclusion — not through malice, but through selective attention. No one intended to silence the topic.

The irony was hard to miss. A meeting devoted to discussing exclusion ended up reproducing its own form of exclusion — not through malice, but through selective attention. No one intended to silence the topic.

The Black Business Association of Amherst Area (BBAAA) was created in 2016 to support Black entrepreneurs, mentorship, visibility, economic opportunity, and community infrastructure. The Black leadership was there, and every discussion was turning into political theater — acknowledging racism, but not Islamophobia or other hate crimes.

Just because a concern belongs to me does not mean the concern is about me. Communities should be capable of the same thing.

The Cost of Outrage
Every issue becomes a gravitational force, pulling attention back toward a preferred narrative and away from the broader point. The result is predictable: The people doing most of the talking leave feeling heard, while the people whose concerns never made it onto the agenda leave wondering why they showed up.

The white people looked as confused as anyone else. The conversation moved faster and louder rather than deeper, with everyone responding to everyone else’s outrage while somehow missing what had been said five minutes earlier.

Classic meeting energy, and zero resolution.

Every institution, every movement, and every town meeting is ultimately a negotiation over who gets heard, who gets resources, and who gets to define reality. The challenge is learning how to use that power responsibly.

Language and Leadership
But this conversation is bigger than one anonymous flyer. At its core, it is about language: how we work with one another, and how words can either build trust or become weapons.

In Amherst, residents speak fluently about equity, inclusion, intersectionality, restorative justice, and belonging. Yet the true test of a community is whether it can remain curious when confronted with viewpoints that challenge its assumptions.

In Amherst, residents speak fluently about equity, inclusion, intersectionality, restorative justice, and belonging. Yet the true test of a community is whether it can remain curious when confronted with viewpoints that challenge its assumptions.

People often celebrate diversity in theory while struggling with disagreement in practice.

Equity is measured by whether people can make room for concerns they were not expecting to hear. That was the point I tried to make during the meeting.

The anonymous flyer was designed to provoke division. The author wanted outrage, and the neighbors turned on one another. Fear spread faster than facts.

The real question is not whether the flyer was racist — that was obvious — but whether a community can respond without becoming captive to the emotions the provocateur intended to create.

A Harder Question
Sometimes the most revealing moment in a public meeting is what people do not respond to at all. The question is how power is exercised and how legitimacy is maintained.

What struck me most at the meeting was the irony that followed.

Representatives connected to local Black advocacy and business organizations spoke passionately about racism, exclusion, grant-funding concerns, and institutional failures.

Yet I found myself wondering whether we were fully recognizing that, at the local level, leadership is much more fragile.

Communities often ask for representation and then become disappointed when representatives turn out to be human beings rather than superheroes.

Equity, inclusion, and belonging are worthy goals, but when that leadership emerges, it often finds itself trapped in an impossible position.

When progress occurs, institutions take the credit. When frustrations remain, leaders become targets.

Yet the deeper question remains: How do communities support leaders while still holding institutions accountable?

What Comes Next?
The meeting seemed to circle around that tension. Some residents focused on the failures of the town. Others viewed the anonymous racist flyer as evidence of persistent bigotry. Still others worried that amplifying the flyer would simply reward the people who distributed it.

Some residents criticized the town manager’s handling of the anonymous racist flyer and questioned why the letter had not been more aggressively publicized.

But as the discussion escalated, it felt as though the town was turning its frustration toward the very people already doing the work.

Instead of moving toward solutions, the discussion became trapped in endless public self-critique without resolution. The emotional energy kept escalating, but practical outcomes remained elusive.

There were references to historical trauma and sweeping condemnations of “the town.” But there was very little discussion about what should actually happen next.

At one point, another participant spoke about her experience as a brown woman. The conversation collapsed into a closed loop and the selective nature of the conversation itself.

What troubled me was how quickly the conversation seemed to settle into a single interpretive framework, where every event already came with a predetermined explanation.

Every disagreement became evidence of prejudice, and institutional constraint became evidence of deliberate exclusion.

Trapped in that dynamic, the possibility of multiple explanations appeared to disappear.

While supporting Black residents, the community should not ignore Islamophobia. While confronting antisemitism, it should not dismiss anti-Black racism.

A truly inclusive community is measured by whether it can make room for concerns that arrive unexpectedly, and whether it can recognize harms that do not fit neatly into the dominant narrative of the moment.

Inclusion is not only about who gets invited into the room, but also about whose concerns remain visible once the conversation begins. Because after the outrage subsides, the work is what ultimately matters.

Rizwana Khan is a writer, educator, and human rights advocate in Amherst.