The-Sporting-Life.

My timeline is blowing up with messages of solidarity from other students of colour and allies. This message was an agreed upon statement written by Yale students of colour, and now has spread to students from Stanford, Spelman, GT, Notre Dame, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, UCBerkeley, Oxford, UC Berkeley, Pomona, Bucknell, Vanderbilt, Tufts, and so many more schools I can’t name. This is the kind of unity and solidarity that needs to come from threats to our happiness and safety. This is the kind of black community we need to create.

Most people are aware of what is going on at Mizzou, and for those who aren’t sure of what’s going on at Yale, just know that the media is spinning things the way it always does, so don’t trust everything you read. It was never about an email, or halloween costume, or frat party. It’s been about the prejudice and racism faced by minority students everyday in places that they should consider home. We’re not taking it anymore.

The University of Missouri is not the only campus currently embroiled in a controversy over race. At my alma mater, Yale University, there is a tense debate about racism on campus that has garnered national attention.

Most reports focus on a campus-wide email sent by the university’s Intercultural Affairs Council suggesting students avoid culturally insensitive costumes. There was a counter-email sent by a professor and wife of a college “master,” saying the initial email teetered on free speech suppression. At the same time, members of a popular Yale fraternity were accused of turning away black women at a party in favor of “white girls only.” These reports provide only a sneak peek into a muchlarger picture.

To understand what is happening at Yale you need 300 years of context, but I will start with the last eight. When I left Texas for Yale in 2007, what I knew was that it was one of the best institutions of higher learning in the world. What I did not know is that in the years to come I would see the words “nigger school” spray painted on the wall of a residential hall, I would encounter almost exclusively black and brown faces serving students in campus dining halls, I would learn of a courtyard in another residential hall playfully referred to as “slave quarters,” I would hear debates about why Calhoun College still bears the name of one of history’s most vigorous proponents of slavery, I would watch the school hemorrhage talent from its faculty, and I (a woman of color) would call live-in professors “masters,” without irony. These are only a few examples of how racism, both historical and contemporary, institutional and individual, create an atmosphere at Yale that is hard to articulate and even harder to ignore.