Yale: Protest Ensues After Racially Charged Incidents

The incident has added fuel to the fire of another controversy surrounding protesting students at Yale, the elite Ivy League university in CT. Copy may not be in its final form. A union for teaching assistants is in place at only one private USA school, NY University, where the administration gave its blessing in 2013.

Meanwhile, students at more than 20 colleges – including at Harvard, Columbia and Syracuse universities – have also been inspired by the Missouri case and are planning solidarity demonstrations this week.

At Yale, the last week saw widespread condemnation of an alleged racial incident at a fraternity, but also debate over whether an associate master of a residential college showed insensitivity to minority students when she sent out an email encouraging less of a focus on offensive Halloween costumes.

One incident involved a fraternity on campus, which was accused of hosting a “white girls only” party over Halloween weekend. Monday’s crowd of a thousand chanted slogans including, “We are unstoppable, another Yale is possible”.

Students called it the “March of Resilience” and said their goal is to create a more inclusive campus.

We welcome you, Lex, back to Democracy Now! Neither in the importance it placed upon freedom of expression, nor in its excellent point about it being wrong for an institution to enforce “implied control” over student choice.

LEX BARLOWE: Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Following the meeting, Salovey said in his email that he was “deeply troubled” by the conversation and that the entire school community must join together to create greater “inclusion, healing, mutual respect and understanding” at Yale.

Of course in an ideal world, nothing like this would ever cause a violent reaction, but we have to understand where people are coming from – a long line of bigotry, white supremacy and overall disrespect has lead them to this moment.

Erika Christakis, who is also an administrator at a residence hall, wrote that students should be able to wear any costume they want.

700 of the students wrote a second letter and even organized a rally to protest her statements. Yet you respond not with an apology.

Are the students’ protests against the Christakises protected speech?

“Why the f-k did you accept the position?” Aaron Z. Lewis, a Yale senior, wrote online at Medium that Yale students shouldn’t have to be organizing forums and pushing for officials to acknowledge their pain and the bias they experience. So, my question is: Are you going to say that or not?

The short and dirty version is that the school sent out guidelines for costumes that should avoid racially insensitive and derogatory costumes of all types, a seemingly reasonable request.

LEX BARLOWE: Yeah, absolutely. Pretty simple and pretty polite, to be honest. Lukianoff “is the author of “Coddling of the American Mind”, an article in The Atlantic that Erika Christakis tweeted last week in response to criticism of her October 30 email”, according to the Daily. “I thought that I had a few credibility with you, you know?”

Unfortunately, student activists there are in danger of letting specific, addressable grievances, such as lingering segregation in the university’s fraternity and sorority scene, get lost in a gauzy, unsatisfiable push for safe spaces.

Now that an open dialogue has been brought to campus, time will tell if behavior towards cultural appropriation will change. And so, it really did create a completely unsafe atmosphere on campus. “You should not sleep at night!” Last year, the son of NY Times columnist Charles Blow, then a junior at Yale, was held at gunpoint by campus security on his way home from the library.

Several American commentators have expressed their bewilderment at how an apparently mild email encouraging students to think, debate and not to overreact could be enough to provoke a hate mob. Where is our email? If I see something which is offensive, I ignore it. People have the right to be offensive, just as they do to be offended. I hope that Yale will become a genuine home for all of its marginalized students. But we don’t want to debate more.

AMY GOODMAN: Was it also inspired by or fueled by what happened at the University of Missouri? And if the college doesn’t, then people need to be fired. “There’s power in solidarity, there’s power in a unified voice, and it exposes systemic racism in higher education”, Brooks said. Hopefully, Yale is starting to realize the extent to which many students of color feel they have been denied participation in this idyll. Many people (especially women of color) said they feel physically and psychologically unsafe here.

AMY GOODMAN: Lex Barlowe, I want to thank you for joining us, African American studies major at Yale University, president of the Black Student Alliance.