Veronica Root’s (MSB ‘05) bad day was about to get worse. She had already sat through five classes and dealt with an offensive joke made by a student in one of her classes. Now, she was about to face an act of deliberate hatred.
She returned home and just wanted to relax, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened during her last class. During a classroom discussion, a student and professor had joked about how being a minority is the easiest way to get accepted into Georgetown. Although Root had heard it many times before from Georgetown students, she couldn’t believe a teacher would joke like that during class. “I was just tired. I walked into my room and sat down with my jacket still on and my bag still over my shoulder and checked my e-mail,” she said.
But the subject line of the first e-mail Root noticed read, “Black power is powerless.” Worried about what it contained, she clicked hesitantly and started reading. “Dear Niggers,” it said. She didn’t even read the rest. “A wave of fatigue just ran over me. It was the first time in my life that I wanted to leave Georgetown,” Root said.
The e-mail, sent to Georgetown’s Black Student Alliance by an unidentified man in Florida, included other derogatory comments and called for blacks to “go back to Africa.”
Root, president of the BSA, said she didn’t waste time getting too upset. “I was angry at first, but then I just sat there and thought, ‘OK, what are we going to do about it?’”
The e-mail came during a time when an increased amount of hate-based incidents have occurred at Georgetown.
Three weeks before, one of Root’s housemates, Ashley Terrell (NHS ‘05) had gotten out of bed at 3 a.m. to ask a rowdy group of students outside of her home to quiet down. Someone in the group called her a “nigger” and told her to “go and pick up her welfare check,” Root said.
Another incident occurred a week later when fliers were placed on top of The Fire This Time, Georgetown’s newsmagazine for students of color, that included derogatory statements toward blacks, Jews and gays and lesbians.
Andrew Rivera (MSB ‘05), treasurer of the BSA, explained that racially charged incidents like these happen frequently at Georgetown, but they fly under the radar of the majority of students, faculty and administrators. “I’ve heard racist comments before, but I just let it go. But when you hear of other people who are having the same problems, it suddenly becomes a great, massive problem,” he said.
Root sees racism as an institutionalized problem at Georgetown. “If Georgetown were a corporation,” Root said, “it would have been sued a long time ago. The way I see it, I am currently in a hostile learning environment.”
Root relays multiple experiences in which she has had to defend her place at Georgetown because of her race, despite the fact that she graduated as the valedictorian of her high school and served as her school’s student body president. “I am tired of fighting people. I am tired of telling people that I deserve to come to Georgetown,” she said.
Rivera has had similar experiences. Professors sometimes call on him to add the “black perspective” to class discussions and sometimes ask him after class if they’ve said anything to offend him. “I feel like I have to be a representative. I can’t just speak for myself, I have to speak for the whole community,” he said.
Dennis Williams, Director of the Center for Minority Educational Affairs, explains that although incidents like these are not hate crimes, they can wear down the dignity of students who must endure them on a daily basis. “The majority of students may not understand that people who are identified as different can pick up scrapes and bruises everyday just by walking around. One day, you finally look down at yourself and realize you’re bleeding,” Williams said.
“Sometimes you don’t want to look at yourself as an outsider. It’s very burdensome to define your university experience with race as one of the factors,” Rivera said. “You’re forced to define your entire world that way.”
This isn’t the first time that intolerance has galvanized minority communities at Georgetown. In 2000, a group called the Unity Coalition formed after blacks, Jews and gays and lesbians were targets of a series of unrelated hate-based incidents.
The coalition presented the administration with a 12-page report entitled, “Ending Hate and Intolerance: A Plan of Action” that listed known incidents of bias that had occurred on campus.
According to their report, students desecrated a menorah in Red Square on three separate occasions, black students living in Georgetown’s Black house recieved hate-mail and an assailant threatened a homosexual student with a weapon in LXR Hall and scrawled homophobic slurs around the building.
The report also included the coalition’s recommendations on how to change the atmosphere of the school. The administration agreed with some of their suggestions, adding specific provisions to the student code of conduct to address hate crimes and requiring the Department of Public Safety to include hate crimes in their annual crime statistics. It is widely believed as well that the efforts of the Unity Coalition paved the way for the creation of the African American studies minor. The program will graduate its first senior this year.
Though Root believes these steps were headed in the right direction, she does not think the administration did enough to change the campus’ culture of intolerance. “The resolutions they presented then in regards to hate incidents and hate crime reporting are very similar to the things that we are presenting now. The administration was already given these suggestions and they did not act upon them.”
Williams, who was involved in the discussions four years ago, points out that positive changes did come about as a result of their efforts. “Last time there was no official policy regarding hate crimes and we addressed that problem. Now we are pressing for ways to acknowledge, collect and maintain reports of incidents like harassment, not just hate crimes. I would argue that that’s a sign of progress,” Williams said.
Williams does agree, though, that some serious issues were left unaddressed. “We failed in the sense that enough of the right people were not persuaded to make changes.”
The University, however, has a second chance to tackle campus intolerance. Success or failure rests on the shoulders of the students advocating for change and the administrators who will ultimately decide what to do.
Students like Root and Rivera have already proven that this new generation of students are well organized and ready to fight. Soon after the BSA received the now infamous e-mail, their 12-person board met with leaders of Georgetown’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to plan a town hall meeting that would be open to all of the Georgetown community. On the night of Feb. 26, concerned students and administrators filled a large classroom in the ICC.
It’s not often that a group of high-ranking Georgetown administrators gather in one room, on one night, to listen to students concerns, but Interim-Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson, College Dean Jane McAuliffe, Vice President for Public Affairs and Strategic Development Dan Porterfield and Williams all attended.The administrators saw a room full of concerned students who matched their anger with creative solutions to positivly change the school.
The town hall meeting attendees made plans for a rally in Red Square the next day and a five -point petition to be presented to Univeristy President John J. DeGioia as he walked into his office at 7 a.m. the next Monday.
The petition advocates mandatory diversity training for all professors, a change in CMEA’s mission statement to include the education of the greater Georgetown community, a concrete procedure for reporting hate crimes, changes to the curriculum to include more diverse requirements, and an upgrade of the African American minor to a major.
Williams considers the students’ petition a “well-reasoned” response addressing problems that have accumulated over time. He seemed optimistic about the chances of students and administrators seeing eye-to-eye on many of the issues.
The rally the next day drew several hundred students who held signs and wore black clothing to show solidarity. The University community looked on as various students spoke out against racism and called on the administrators to listen to their concerns and to respond swiftly.
Three days later, students gathered in Healy Circle at 7 a.m. to confront DeGioia as he arrived in his office in the Healy Building. DeGioia accepted the petition and reiterated the University’s committment to inclusion and tolerance. “Too many people have worked too hard for too many years to create a unique community here,” he said.
Tomorrow, student representatives will meet with DeGioia to hear his response to their resolutions.
Although Root knows that the administration decided not to accept a similar platform only four years ago, she seems optimistic. Over the last four years, much of the administration has changed, including a new University president, provost and vice-president for student affairs.
And although she is ready to fight if the administration does not meet their demands, Root hopes the process ends swiftly. “I’m not here to lead movements or do any of this. I’m here to learn. I came to Georgetown so I can go to law school. I didn’t come to Georgetown so I’d have to deal with all of this,” Root said.
Rivera echoed Root’s sentiments; he’s willing to do whatever it takes to change the University, but his academics need to come first. But, he noted, the University needs rallies like his to push them to become more progressive places. “Administrators have told me that we need this type of thing to move the University forward,” he said. “It’s sad that we have to be reactionary. We’re not as conscientious as we should be,” Rivera said
