It’s long. You should watch it anyway.
Following public comments by President Roth and the WSA, the discussion surrounding Monday night’s forum on race and diversity continues around campus—in online comments, in blog posts, but most of all in personal conversations I’ve overheard (or took part in) over the past few days.
If you missed the forum and still aren’t sure what all of the talk is about, Ben Doernberg ’13 (who livestreamed the event on Monday) has taken the liberty of consolidating his footage into one master YouTube video. It’s long (the forum began at 7:30 and continued well past 10 pm), and the video quality isn’t ideal, but you should easily be able to make out what’s being said. And you should watch it, too. Three hours is daunting, so split it into segments. Let the audio play while you’re doing work. Listen to it on your iPhone while running. But listen.
As one of the students on the panel remarks about thirty minutes in, “These are discussions that we must have, and not discussions that are silenced.”
For more on this forum, read this or this. My rough notes from the forum are here.
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My housemate was watching this when I came home, so I marked the beginnings of comments for the parts we watched together and made links that should go straight there. If people want to contribute times from before/after the section I got, that would be awesome; you can skip to a certain point in a YouTube video by adding &t=XXmXXs to the end of the URL (put in a double-digit seconds number and 2- or 3-digit minutes number as needed). The descriptions are minimal, but since I don’t think I can fairly summarize everything said and you should really be watching anyway, I hope people will forgive me for that. Here’s what I grabbed:
http://is.gd/qPu7Fj – Sonia Manjon introduces the questions part of the forum.
http://is.gd/EJWhlz – Roth says that he needs to take initiative and solicit community input, acknowledging that he hasn’t lived up to this so far.
http://is.gd/D1M9ig – Dorisol takes up Roth on the offer to hear input.
http://is.gd/3PkXRb – Chantaneice cautions against action without understanding of the problem; Dorisol adds on to the understanding.
http://is.gd/hVvs8j – Evan (Okun) calls for us to problematize our roles as students at an elite university.
http://is.gd/b94T99 – Manjon directs discussion to the ACB; audience comments begin in response.
http://is.gd/LMqM4r – The conversation is directed back to steps. Dave Meyer is confronted about Public Safety’s role in town-gown relations, including the email reports.
http://is.gd/6gLSSz – Students start to tell stories of Public Safety misconduct, including neglect and racial profiling. After several of these, Roth says “this wrecks the mission of the university” (a little before the 90-minute mark).
Please let me know if you have an issue with the sentence or two I wrote about a part of the video. Again, if anyone wants to expand these, that would be awesome.