Opinion

Bias response team must increase transparency

By Jake Blount ’17

Around 11:00PM on Thursday, September 25th, my friend and I were walking down the hill to his dorm room.  We’d enjoyed a lovely night in the Filius Events Barn with Shakey Graves, and were chatting about his music as my friend fiddled with his bike.  We had just passed Couper Hall when a vehicle turned toward us off of campus road.  It drove up the hill toward us, a bright LED flashlight flickering on in the passenger seat as it neared us.  The flashlight worked as intended, dazzling our eyes and keeping us from identifying the vehicle’s occupants.  The car slowed to a crawl as we passed.

“Hey, nigger boy!”

There was no context surrounding the man’s words, and no context could possibly excuse them.  The car slowly regained speed and continued up the hill; my friend and I stared after it without speaking, still too blind from the flashlight’s glare to see the license plate number.  He slowly turned to me.  Anger had narrowed his eyes and tightened his jaw.

“He didn’t just say what I think he said?”

The following night, after filing an online Bias Incident Report and speaking with two members of the Bias Incident Response Team, the two of us found ourselves across the desk from Officer Francis A. Manfredo, the Director of Campus Safety.  The interview was a harrowing experience; giving voice to such memories is never easy, but things were further complicated by Officer Manfredo’s attitude toward the incident.  Sympathetic and professional though he was, from the moment we finished recounting our tale, the conversation turned to why the vehicle could not have been from the College itself—why it must have been an outsider.  The issue: there is absolutely no logic behind that assumption.

Firstly: I can vividly recall any number of instances in which racist slurs have been hurled in my direction.  Never before has anyone who does not know me thought to call me a nigger.  Though the word does apply to me, I do not look the part (and neither does my white friend).  Only one who knows me, my family and how I identify would know to direct that epithet at me.  Secondly: the two of us were under a streetlamp, and therefore clearly visible at the time.  The man shining a flashlight at us did so to hide his face to avoid being identified and punished; hardly much of a concern for a total stranger.  Thirdly: we found several silver, 2006 Scion XBs collectively in the Campus Safety registry and on our search of the parking lots with Officer Manfredo and one of his coworkers.  Any of them could have been a possibility, and none of them—to my knowledge—were ever investigated.

On the following Wednesday, October 1st, I received a call from Officer Manfredo, notifying me that a car matching our description was found down the hill, that the matter had been turned over to the Kirkland Police Department, and that I would be notified of further steps.  No picture of the vehicle in question was ever sent to my friend or I to be verified, and the Kirkland PD never sought any contact with us.

Forty-two days later, I have heard absolutely nothing.

I have expressed my severe vexation with the College’s responses (or lack thereof) to the concerns of minority students repeatedly, loudly, and publicly.  I often find my audience puzzled as to the source of my anger, and this incident epitomizes it: that discrimination is allowed to exist at Hamilton, that denial is more rampant still, and that no concrete action is taken to rectify the situation.

Take, for example, the recently convened Campus Inclusion Task Force.  While it certainly sounds quite a noble initiative, it exists in an impenetrable fog of unanswered questions.  I know two things about it: who is on it (with the exception of the students), and that they asked me to complete a survey.  I can think of a few more things I’d like to know: what do they do during meetings?  Are their meetings open to the public?  If so, when and where do they meet?  Do they have a purpose or mission?  Do they have a set of concrete goals?  If so, by what means will they be accomplished?

I asked these questions of a member of the Task Force.  She didn’t have an answer for any of them.

Last year, students from the Movement, an anonymous on-campus activist group, published a list of specific measures that would make the College a more welcoming and accessible place for minority students.  These requests were panned by the College community and were deemed unworthy even of negotiation by the administration.  We, the students, were ignored.  The venom on Hamilton Secrets and Yik Yak grew in quantity and intensity, without any concrete opposition on the part of the administration.  To this day, despite repeated requests from students, the administration has not even attempted to ban either service from the campus—a step that many other educational institutions around the country have taken.

And, in the absence of real action, this Task Force with no actual Task was created.  Endless platitudes were spouted.  The administration brought center focus to discussions of outside issues like the murder of Mike Brown in order to avoid confronting the problems facing our own community.  The safety and comfort of students of color on the Hamilton College campus were sacrificed in order to strengthen our delusions of security.

I have often heard my peers discuss the notion of a “Hamilton bubble,” failing to realize that the system of safeguarding and shelter they refer to is not accessible to many students.  In my belief, the sense of powerlessness and distress that many students of color at Hamilton feel stems from the underlying culture of our campus: one which assumes safe haven within the campus boundaries, and often prioritizes the survival of such illusions over the well-being of those who, like myself, have been forcibly disabused of them.  Although many will seek to downplay or ignore what happened to me, I cannot emphasize this enough: in many places, what happened to me falls under the legal definition of a hate crime.

I and many other minority students experience true safety at Hamilton only as a rare, ephemeral sensation, and certainly never as a concrete reality.  Members of the campus “community” have subjected students like me, as individuals and as a group, to verbal, psychological, and even physical assault several times since I arrived on this campus.  Those of us who choose to voice our truths and articulate our real-life experiences of discrimination and micro-aggressions find ourselves publicly vilified, raked over the coals on social media, and told that we are being overly sensitive and disrespectful of our peers.  Minority students who choose—quite reasonably—not to subject themselves to such abuse are often blamed by faculty and administrators for Hamilton’s lax approach to issues of inclusion; interestingly, many of those who work for this educational institution believe it is our job, not theirs, to educate our peers.

It is my hope that the reader now understands the situation in which I and so many others find ourselves: a paradoxical state of affairs wherein we are both shamed into and shamed for speaking our truths, where our peers and superiors feel entitled both to an education we can provide and to the false sense of security of which it would rob them, and where the very same individuals who make us feel unsafe are often portrayed as our victims.  Our peers seem to shift unpredictably between feelings of sympathy, apathy and antipathy.  The administrative body as a whole, whatever the intentions of the persons within may be, has merely slipped sugar pills to the student population, obscuring the important issues in committees, teams, and task-less Task Forces so that we cannot bring them to the fore.

At the end of the day, fiercely though minority students have fought for just treatment, we are just that: a minority.  We cannot transform the dominant culture of Hamilton College on our own, try though we may.  We need the help of our fellow Continentals to make the sea change we seek.  The first step is easy: listen.  Feel free to start now.

No comments yet.

All Opinion