Theta Tau. Ackerman. Madrid. Day Hall.

Here we go again.

I am a junior at SU and each year I have seen how this university handles racism and racist incidents. The simple answer is that these situations are handled with a temporary fix.

This school provides solutions such as SEM 100, for freshman students to talk about diversity and inclusion through a book club forum, and expects it to stop and fix all racism and racist incidents on this campus. They hesitate to hold students accountable and expel fraternity chapters and fraternity members. They allow their professors to use derogatory language in the name of literature, but yet don’t account for the comfort of students in these classrooms. They prefer to hide the problem because they are scared of the media attention and negative press.

These “solutions” are attempts by the university to save face and only convey to the students of color that SU officials don’t care about us. It illustrates that our safety, our wellbeing and our mental health is not a priority. Their reputation and their sponsor’s dollars is obviously more important.

That’s disgusting. My family pays the same amount of money that my white counterparts pay, yet their Syracuse experience is cared for more than mine. That’s what the school communicates to me, to my family, to the other students of color on this campus, and to their families.

But this Day Hall incident blazes a different fire of anger. The university deliberately tried to hide this racist incident from other students and from the media. Day Hall residents have spoken out and said that they were told not to share images of the vandalism and to keep quiet about their meetings with university officials. This vandalism occurred on Wednesday, yet the student body didn’t receive official word until Monday evening. The chancellor didn’t email the student body until Tuesday morning.

As a mentor to freshman women of color, the fact that we didn’t know about this incident until days later, angers me — to know that there are students who don’t feel comfortable in the beds in which they sleep because they don’t know who would write derogatory words about them, or to think that as a high school senior you applied to multiple schools, chose to come to SU and during your first semester you are told to be quiet about the racism that is directed at you. The innocence of freshman year is diminished for these students.

And as these incidents keep occurring, a certain numbness waves over the student body because we start to recognize that this is a norm being forced upon us — that the Syracuse University experience we pay for is one where administrators fail to deal with racism and where students have to actively fight against this cast of normality that is trying to be placed upon us.

Enough is enough. So to the university, if our anger wasn’t loud enough before, recognize that we will be heard now.

And while I am disappointed, but not surprised, about this situation, I know we won’t settle for mediocre solutions anymore.

Jewél Jackson is a junior newspaper and online journalism major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at jjacks17@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter @JewlJackson1.

Published on November 12, 2019 at 11:06 pm