​Bring it all home and learn

On Monday, we discussed our campus’ dire need for leadership to step up with helpful solutions or to enact the ones we offered. On Tuesday, we sought to have a conversation with regular students, answering the common question of “What can I do?” with the usual advice about sympathy and, tantamount to that, demands that they push administrators, academic leadership and DSG representatives to be visibly proactive in their roles.

Now, we turn away from our campus to the University of Missouri, Yale University and Berkeley High School in California. These places of learning have recently dealt with their own controversies of cultural appropriation, gender and racial discrimination and hate crimes. These events coincide with the string of hateful events that have plagued our campus in recent months, with the timeline stretching back years. Although the circumstances are different on each campus, the key lesson is that there is no graduating away from issues of structural discrimination by leaving Duke. The moral of the story is to constantly educate yourself.

At the University of Missouri, the president and chancellor both resigned Monday following protests about repeatedly feeble administrative responses to incidents that began with racial slurs against the student body president in September and against members of the Legion of Black Collegians, culminating in a swastika drawn with feces in a residence hall in October. Even more so than at Duke, students there were deeply frustrated by inaction and insufficient responses. That the problems and demands at Missouri are similar to those on our campus reinforces that these slurs and acts of vandalism are not “just trolls getting a reaction.”

At Yale, students called for responses from leadership in a tense campus climate resulting most recently from emails sent to students about cultural insensitivity and from discrimination against students at a party. Much like at Duke, the university has proliferated a campus climate wherein minority students feel less safe and supported than they should. As students at an institution of similar privilege, we should see that these problematic environments are simply not “just at Duke.”

At Berkeley High, we actually see perpetrators of hate crimes brought to due justice. Following a lynching death threat left on a library computer, the school has moved to punish the student found responsible and immediately gave relevant evidence to the local authorities for a proper investigation. We recognize that college is a time for students to engage with dissenting ideas and to make mistakes that they learn from. However, it is unreasonable to pretend it is right to shelter students from real-world standards. It should be obvious that these things are not okay because “it happened in college.”

In considering these cases, we advance that students take these headlines and find where we are in them. This learning cements these problems as real and forces engagement with difficult questions like “What will you do to save black lives?” Pointing out that these issue are inescapable should not elicit defeat but urgency to call out intolerance and to think hard about who can do what to help.

Issues of structural racism and discrimination do not exist only within the confines of Duke or any other campus for that matter. These issues will continue to plague American society and therefore continue to require of ourselves, our peers and our leaders that we aggressively pursue solutions. If you were not going to already, we urge the community to attend Friday’s conversation in Page Auditorium with President Brodhead, Provost Kornbluth and Dean Ashby. Bring your stories of hurt and sympathy, your solutions for campus and an attitude that demands action from our community from top to bottom.