Waves of protests shake U.S. universities
Ithaca College students join spreading wave of revolt over racial issues on campus
WASHINGTON— In October, the leaders of Ithaca College, a well-regarded university in upstate New York, had three graduates speak on a panel about the future of the school.
The discussion was uneventful until one of the panellists, a black woman named Tatiana Sy, spoke of her “savage hunger” to succeed. An impressed white panelist, billionaire investor Christopher Burch, then began calling her “the savage.” When she expressed discomfort, he said he was complimenting her.
The very next day, a Jewish fraternity sent out a Facebook invitation to a theme party called “Preps and Crooks.” Crooks, the invitation clarified, were to dress in “a ’90s thuggish style”: “bandana, baggy sweats and a T-shirt . . . and any ‘bling’ you can find!”
Racially insensitive. Very possibly racist. Not an obvious crisis. In years past, insults like the two on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9 — “microaggressions,” in current campus jargon — might have prompted an emotional dialogue meeting or angry letters to the student newspaper.
Last week, Ithaca’s students made sure they became national news.
More than 1,000 of the school’s 6,600 students joined a protest Wednesday to demand the resignation of president Tom Rochon. The day involved a dramatic “die-in” and a chant in Zulu: “Power is ours!”
“The racism here is a systematic issue, and it’s been going on for quite some time. It’s just that the recent events on this campus were the tipping point,” said Elijah Breton, a black Ithaca senior who led the first protest in October.
A wave of ambitious student activism has spread this fall around the U.S., fuelled by intense media interest in race and strongly influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement. From elite private schools such as Yale to big public schools such as Missouri, black students and their allies are demanding both policy changes and penance from top officials.
The demonstrations have been greeted with confusion and disdain by conservatives and many others. To their critics, the activists are not civil-rights fighters battling institutional discrimination but coddled whiners targeting the wrong people for trivial or isolated incidents.
“If you’re afraid of having your feelings hurt, don’t leave your house,” said CNN anchor Don Lemon.
Rochon’s offence, Ithaca students argue, is not what he has done but what he has not done. They say he failed to respond adequately to the two October incidents, plus an August controversy over insensitive comments alleged to have been made by campus police officers. And he has failed, they say, to make an effort to eradicate a culture of racism that makes students of colour feel unsafe.
“Any time you are the leader of an institution, it is your job, it is your responsibility, to ensure the safety and inclusiveness for everyone, for all on this campus,” said Breton, 21. “If you’re the leader, when people offer you solutions and you don’t take them, when people provide you with the issues and you’re apathetic towards them, that creates a culture, a long-lasting culture, of apathy, racism and ignorance.” The demand for Rochon’s head over sins of omission might seem outlandish if not for what happened last Monday at the University of Missouri. Aided by a strike threat by the school’s football players, a protest of an alleged administration failure to take racism seriously forced the resignation of the president.
Despite their victory, the story did not unfold quite as the Missouri protesters wanted. Their campaign helped push the national race debate into close contact with the elite de- bate over the intellectual climate on campuses in the era of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings.” When a white Missouri professor who studies Lady Gaga fans and 50 Shades of Grey readers was filmed trying to force a photographer out of the protest site, opponents had the cartoon villain they needed to shift the conversation from racial injustice to free speech.
Activists were dismayed. And then their point was made for them. A white student at a nearby college was arrested Wednesday for an alleged threat to go to Missouri and “shoot every black person” in sight.
“We’re seeing that even in these spaces, black lives do not matter,” said Omololu Babatunde, 22, a leading activist at the University of North Carolina before her graduation this year. “And that these spaces are not disassociated from the streets.”
Babatunde spearheaded a campaign to get the school to rename a hall named after a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. For a time, she said, black students benefiting from the civil rights movement “were able to just exist in a ‘we’ve arrived’ kind of narrative,” aware of their relative privilege. They were jolted into action, she said, by recent killings of young blacks, some of them fellow students.
She rattled off challenges she said were experienced by blacks at North Carolina: anonymous threats on social media, a campus built by slaves still littered with a monument to the Confederacy, racist assumptions by faculty and fellow students.
“My dad’s from Nigeria, my mom’s from South Africa,” she said. “For them, liberation was being able to be in these schools. ‘OK, now I have a place in here and showing I’m better than anyone else.’ I’m like, yeah, that’s great, I’m grateful beyond belief for that, but now I’m in these spaces, and these spaces are not working for me at all. At all.”