Students of color at Haverford College continue strike for racial equity
Several students felt compelled to go into the city and join hundreds of others in protest of police brutality, but the administrators email discouraged students from doing so. They told students that protesting in Philadelphia would not bring Walter Wallace back.
While we all might be tempted to join protests about this tragedy, we are imploring you to temper that impulse, the email said. Now is not the time to go to Philadelphia. Our fear is that for every righteous protestor in the street, there are other actors afoot; we have seen this across the nation far too often, in cities large and small, in college towns and urban centers.
Trevor Stern, a junior at the college, who is white, said the email could have used more sensitive language. But over all he interpreted it as a consideration for students safety amid unrest in the city and the risk of contracting COVID-19, which the college has strict protocols for, especially when it comes to off-campus travel.
However, Collison-Cofie, who is Black, called the email insensitive and disgusting. She and other Black student organizers felt it represented what they have believed about the college for several months — administrators are willing to label Haverford is an antiracist institution, but they have not actively promoted and supported the antiracist activism work of students or adopted the antiracist initiatives that students of color proposed, student organizers said. During the Zoom meeting, they said they are dissatisfied with the amount of listening and learning college administrators continue to do, rather than taking specific steps forward on the demands and action student organizers have laid out for them.
And so, after attempts to do it the cordial way, the students decided to escalate their action, Collison-Cofie said.
If it takes striking for you guys to listen to us, make some change and have some action to prove this is truly the antiracist institution it is claiming to be and actually supporting its lower income and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] students, then that s the risk we re willing to take, Collison-Cofie said. There has been much open dialogue, there have been many workshops & It shows the performative nature of many people on campus.
H/t SEB.
The demands of the Bryn Mawr student group are especially special.