Many remember when in March 2013 some Washington University fraternity pledges walked into a dining hall and read rap lyrics with the N-word in front of group of African-American students.
The racial incident made national news, and the fraternity’s national leaders ordered a temporary “cease and desist” of all the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter’s activities.
Since that moment, a passionate group of students has been dedicated to making sure university administrators follow up on their promises of hiring staff dedicated to diversity. The students celebrated a big milestone on Tuesday, Sept. 23 when the university held its grand opening of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion.
“Are we excited about this center?” Sam Lai, a student representative to the center’s advisory board, said at the opening reception. “Absolutely. But I think in the way that a village under attack is excited to hear that they are just now getting a wall. ‘Relieved,’ I think, is a better word. You may think that’s a dramatic metaphor. You may think that it’s excessive to bring violence into the conversation. But I think it wouldn’t be prudent to pretend that this center is not inexorably involved in violence.”
In an interview with The St. Louis American, Lai said the most important aspect of the center is the hiring of LaTanya N. Buck, the center’s director. Before now, there was not one staff person dedicated to developing diversity programming and simply providing a listening ear for historically marginalized students, Lai said. A few people in the Student Involvement and Leadership Office had played that role in addition to their other responsibilities, he said, but there was no full-time position to advocate for marginalized students alone.
“It’s a great start that they have allocated financial resources,” Lai said. “That’s how they communicate to us that it’s important.”
Buck said the center’s main mission is to provide advocacy and support for historically marginalized students on campus. It will also create partnerships with campus and community members to promote dialogue and social change. She said she’s excited to start working with the students and encouraging more conversation on inclusion.
“This is what the students wanted,” said Buck, who came to Wash. U. from Saint Louis University, where she was director of the Cross Cultural Center. “Our priority is to focus on the student community.”
After the fraternity incident in 2013, the university launched the Mosaic Project – which was basically a negotiating process between administrators and students on implementing the student group’s demands. For students, Lai said the time leading up to the center’s opening has been full of “communication breaking down.”
“It’s mostly been a frustrating process in terms of working with the administration,” he said. “The administration has lots of other concerns. The culture and the systems of the university work way slower. For students who are here for four years and then gone, there isn’t the same sense of urgency for administrators.”
Buck said she will first listen to students to better understand what their needs are. In the future, she looks forward to working with their community partners to support and engage students.
“A lot of healing needs to take place,” Buck said. “There are lots of conversations that need to take place. After we work through some of that, that’s when I look to reach out into the broader community.”
In Lai’s speech, he noted that some people will leave the center’s reception and go make “another label on a file or another Google calendar event” for the tasks the center aims to accomplish.
“Others of us will walk home and be stopped twice by a cop for our skin color, will have police headlights trained on our face,” Lai said. “Some of us will still fear for our lives the moment we walk off our campus. Or out of this room.”
In a class on black criminality, students were talking about slave patrols, about how slave codes made it so black individuals – regardless of whether they were free or enslaved – had to walk around with documentation to prove they were free or had their master’s permission to be about.
“A fellow student raised the point that something similar happens on this campus,” he said. “I have never been stopped on the South 40 and been told to present my Wash. U. ID, but I can’t say the same for my black fellow students.”
For more information, contact the center at 314-935-7535 or email diversityandinclusion@wustl.edu.
