A town-gown culture clash in Oberlin, Ohio reached a fresh level of absurdity last week. At local mom-and-pop store Gibson’s Bakery, a shoplifting incident straight out of Spike Lee’s oeuvre amplified into a boycott, followed by a counter-effort by the community: a “cash mob” to help keep the shop up and running.
Law professor William Jacobson at the blog Legal Insurrection reported the timeline of events—from Gibson’s employees’ call to the police, to the student body of Oberlin College’s-sanctioned boycott, to the locals’ heartening response. “This could have been a case of mob rule destroying a business. But instead, the community rallied around Gibson’s,” Jacobson notes.
The drama seems to have kicked off when an underage Oberlin student caught high-tailing with two bottles of wine under his coat ended up in a fight with Allyn Gibson, an employee at the shop. Countless goofball college kids, many of them at dear old Oberlin, have landed in local jails for equal crimes. But this one involved three black youth—one male, the alleged shoplifter, and two female, who police witnessed engaging in a violent act against Gibson upon responding to the scene. All three were booked, the male for robbery and the females for assault, for after a couple of tussles both inside the shop and out, according to the police report.
But the incident galvanized the community, both on campus and off. The campus chapter of Black Lives Matter, the Student Democrats, and the Oberlin student senate joined a protest of the store. Townies responded with a “cash mob.” They flocked to Gibson’s from surrounding towns to fill up on treats and groceries, inspired online by a viral “Gibson’s Bakery Support Page,” which Facebook took down after a flood of complaints claiming the local “cash mob” campaign perpetrated racism.
The College’s official statement about the ordeal—signed by the president and dean of students—put the matter in the context of the presidential election and commended the student senate’s actions.
Oberlin, home to Lena Dunham’s alma mater, must be accustomed to such impenetrable nonsense. Back in May, Nathan Heller profiled the campus for the New Yorker, finding it host to the same censorious social justice activism as other liberal arts institutions—more so, even, for its rural isolation.
In his much-discussed story, Heller pulled back the veil on old-pattern activist professors afraid of their new-age activist students’ feelings. He interviewed students increasingly unsatisfied by professors and administrators’ imperfect efforts to honor their tessellating inter-sectional identities.
Of these students, Heller pointed out an uncomfortable friction in that “They move their lives to rural Ohio and perform their identities, whatever that might mean.” To rural Ohioans, we can assume, their identity performances mean little more than a sometimes costly and violent annoyance.
