Yale students march against racism amidst ‘white girls only’ party allegations

If you watch the clip out of context, you might miss the point.

The debate over Halloween costumes began late last month when the university’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email to the student body asking students to avoid wearing “culturally unaware and insensitive” costumes that could offend minority students.

This shouldn’t be terribly controversial, right?

After what a few criticized as too prolonged a silence on the incidents, Yale President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway both addressed the issues last week and Salovey was spotted at Monday’s rally. University students in South Africa saw their #FeesMustFall protestscome to fruition – there will be no tuition increase in 2016.

In response, Erika Christakis, a faculty member and an administrator at a student residence, wrote an email to students living in her residence hall on behalf of those she described as “frustrated” by the official advice on Halloween costumes. Talk to each other. Christakis needs to stop instigating more debate.

“I think people need to be sensitive to overt examples of racism”, Bush said.

The “Next Yale” is the name of the student’s movement, which announced a number of demands to the president with a November 18 implementation deadline. Why not give her the benefit of the doubt and assume her anger is justified? A frat brother, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that one African-American woman responded to being turned away by screaming, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” We can only hope that for every “muscle”-bound professor, there are hundreds of other young men and women who with a straight face can say they’re there to “document history” – and mean it”.

“Next Yale intends to hold Yale accountable to its students of color in the public eye”, as stated in their demand letter. When approached by students, Nicholas said he was sorry for “causing pain” but would not apologize for what was said. Erika outraged Yale activists by sending an email prior to Halloween which criticized administration efforts to censor certain Halloween costumes and urged students not to become too angry over costumes that constituted cultural appropriation. Students should not expect universities to coddle them by filtering out views with which they may not agree.

To put it differently, the university didn’t impinge on free speech or the ability of students to disagree with one another but simply discouraged students from offending each other. “I stand behind free speech”.

The protests come more than a year after a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, sparking widespread demonstrations across the US. Should students of color also enjoy the freedom of feeling safe and respected on their campuses? We have things that are related to the ways in which faculty get hired, ethnic studies departments being underfunded, faculty of color being retained. It’s a tall order; in the 2014-2015 academic year, just 22.5 percent of the university’s 4,410 faculty members were minorities, according to CNN Money, while nearly 43 percent of the students enrolled at Yale are minorities.

However, the story of his departure was within hours overwhelmed across the United States by how aggressively the victorious students sought to block free speech. Write more articles. Have important discussions about hard topics with more people. According to Vox, one of Yale’s residential colleges has always been at the center of racial controversy since it is named in honor of former Yale graduate John C. Calhoun, a known white supremacist.