Student Transcript from Town Hall Meeting

I was sitting here thinking about what I hoped to get out of this meeting and the idea of emotion has been a reoccurring theme for me. It’s been mentioned a few times in this meeting and every time we’ve gone around I hoped that we would latch on and delve a little deeper, but I still don’t think it’s been given its respects. And I am afraid to speak on it. I am afraid to say what I am about to say because of a number of different reasons, primarily that on this campus emotional people are torn down: your rationality and intelligence are questioned because you’re just this person who’s yelling or crying or swearing. I want to acknowledge this, so that you hear me when I say that that is the opposite of the case. When you come across someone who is angry or afraid, you should listen even more to what they have to say because you can deny intelligence or rationality but you cannot deny someone’s lived emotions. I want to acknowledge some of the emotions I felt these past two weeks.

Her response to me kindly asking why she was wearing that sombrero in Proctor, verbatim, was, “You know, I just really like to get turnt.” That hurt. It hurt to have someone look me dead in the eye and have them say a cultural artifact important to my heritage was nothing more than a prop for them to get drunk. Then when I tried to explain myself, to have her dismiss me by saying, “Oh no I got this in Canada for my birthday.” – but what you’re doing is cultural appropriation and it – “Oh no, it’s not cultural appropriation, I’m not doing that. It’s totally okay.” She turned her back to me, dismissing any more conversation and I became furious. It was in that moment that I realized this was not an ignorant person; this was someone who was racist. You need to hear that. This was someone who was racist. This moment alone struck fear in me too: this girl could have very well come back at me, could have called Public Safety and said I was being aggressive towards her. Hear me when I say there is fear in even calling someone out on this campus, because the repercussions can be so much worse for People of Color. I’ve felt this fear many times before, especially throughout this semester.

This was the third incident of racism I had experienced this semester. The Otter Nonsense “kissed her doorman” and the soccer team’s “Mexican jumping bean” posters were the two others. These incidents made me afraid. However small you see them, I spent the next few weeks scared because someone on this campus considered this behavior okay, not unlike the much worse incidents of targeted racism I faced in my community growing up. This on top of me having to stop three belligerently drunk soccer players from trying to shit in the urinals in Proctor and have them tell me that, “they won’t have to clean it up so it’s not their problem”. Please hear me when I say that however few or many, these people are in our community right now. And this is the baggage I held as I walked up to that girl in Proctor that Saturday night.

So when you say, “You’re too sensitive” or “have a thicker skin,” I need you to understand, I have had my thicker skin. I am exhausted. I have had enough. These incidents have been eating away at me all semester, made me afraid to go to class, made me angry with myself and the strangers around me because I do not know whether you are the ones doing these transgressions. It’s incidents like these that forced me to move off campus because I do not feel safe in this community anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore. On the worst days, I don’t even want to be living. These events have had serious, dire consequences on me, and the saddest part is that I’m not the only one. I need someone to hear me when I say that mine is one of too many narratives on this campus that share in these emotions. I need someone to understand that there are consequences to what you are doing. There are consequences that you don’t see that are destroying People of Color on this campus. And I need someone to hear me, really hear me when I ask, is it going to take another death on this campus for us to finally understand our actions and enact change?