If you have been paying attention to pop culture over the past week, you may have seen the controversy regarding Macklemore being dropped from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour. Macklemore, who has been outspoken against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, was released following a speech he gave to thousands of audience members at Metlife Stadium.

The antigenocide, pro-liberation and pro-human contents of this speech should not be controversial. Yet, Macklemore faced immediate backlash for his statements, notably from billionaire Zionist Robert Kraft, who threatened to cancel Sheeran’s concert at Gillette Stadium if Macklemore remained Sheeran’s opener.

Rather than standing up for the artist in the wake of cancellation attempts, Sheeran’s team dropped Macklemore from the tour just days after his performance. Sheeran released a statement explaining this decision and elaborating on his take on the situation. This statement, which came in the form of an Instagram post, included an attempt to remain “neutral” and contained a false equivalency between the genocidal state of Israel and the Palestinian resistance to this state through the use of the tired phrase “both sides.”

I remind the reader that two nuclear bombs’ worth of bombardment have been dropped on Gaza, and Israel has faced nowhere near this amount of destruction. And here lies the flawed reasoning both Sheeran and the institution of Colorado State University suffer from. 

Neutrality in times of such great oppression does not exist. The renowned Desmond Tutu suggested: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Sheeran’s neutrality enabled Macklemore to be removed as an opener for his tour. In the same vein is CSU’s neutrality toward Zionist student organizations that deny genocide and dox campus advocates and professors, and conservative organizations that proudly promote the idea that Islam isn’t compatible with America enable division and discrimination to spread through our campus.

It is crucial that the CSU administration and students alike understand doing nothing in times of oppression still does something. It is a conscious choice, and a choice that always favors the dominant voices, institutions and beliefs at play. Supporting or condemning both sides in a situation where there is a clear oppressor-oppressed dynamic only promotes the maintenance of inequality on behalf of the oppressor. You cannot equally support inequality. 

It is time for the students, community members and administration of CSU to take a stand on the side of justice. Our principles of community — which seem to get more and more invisible as time progresses — must be applied, even to the “controversial” issues. CSU cannot deem alienation from its student body and the world at large to be a price worth paying to keep itself free from controversy. After all, as former president Dwight Eisenhower said, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

Exercising the ever-shrinking privilege to stay neutral in an ever-advancing world, rather than implementing the principle of social justice to its fullest extent, will be our university’s downfall, just as it is for Ed Sheeran’s tour.

Ant Albrecht, third-year history and political science student.

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