A New Journey: Arriving at Yale Five Years Ago

I remember being giddy to the point of nausea during my own arrival at Yale five years ago, filled with a heady mix of excitement and trepidation. Rising through the silvered tunnels of Union Station and hailing a cab, watching the spires of campus puncture the bright blue sky during the drive to those astonishing towers that were to be my residence for the next four years. There, suddenly, was the incontrovertible proof that I was somewhere, somewhere exceedingly far from my hometown on the West Coast. Surrounded by an institution that had chosen me and that I had in turn chosen. This place, I recall thinking, was to be my home.

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For the past two weeks, there has been a great deal of organizing and protests at Yale, notably led by women of color undergraduates on campus, stemming from two racially charged, inciting events occurring around Halloween. An email sent out by Yale's Intercultural Affairs Council urged students to be sensitive in their choice of costume; following grumblings from some students, an email from Erika Christakis-wife of Nicholas Christakis, the master of one of the residential colleges-suggested that students should be free to dress up in whatever costumes they wanted, offensive or no. Later that weekend, a black female student reported being turned away from a fraternity party on the basis that it was for "white girls only." Tensions running high, conversations about race turned both inward and outward on campus, from closed-door meetings with college administrators to a thousand-strong March of Resilience from students on Cross Campus.

Yet the resulting media coverage has garbled what remains at the root of these protests, diluting their message entirely for those who have not witnessed the problem firsthand. The Atlantic

https://www.guernicamag.com/larissa-pham-the-architecture-of-racism-at-yale-university/