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Yale Students March Over Concerns About Racial Sensitivity

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Hundreds of Yale students and supporters marched across campus Monday to protest what they see as racial insensitivity at the elite Ivy League school.

The “March of Resilience” followed several racially charged incidents at Yale, including allegations that a fraternity turned a woman away from a party because she was not White.

Students held signs, including one that read, “Don’t Look Away.” They chanted, “We out here. We’ve been here. We ain’t leaving. We are loved” as they marched from the Afro-American Cultural Center across campus and past the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house.

The fraternity denies the incident happened.

The marchers also were upset over an email from a faculty member who objected to a request from the Intercultural Affairs Committee that students avoid wearing racially insensitive Halloween costumes, such as Native American headgear, turbans or blackface.

Erika Christakis, who is also an administrator at a residence hall, wrote that students should be able to wear any costume they want.

“Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” she wrote to students at the residence hall. “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”

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