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Clashes in Thomson Hall

By James Steinbauer, Editor-in-Chief

Allegations of gender- and race-based harassment in Thomson Hall culminated last Thursday evening in an open dialogue between girls in the RedHawk Traditions and Social Justice LLCs.

Jane, who requested her real name remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from girls in her corridor, is a trans student living in the Social Justice LLC in Thomson Hall. She said the harassment began with vandalization of whiteboards in the LLCs' shared corridor.

Students in the Social Justice LLC would write phrases like #BlackLivesMatter and #GayLivesMatter on the whiteboards outside their rooms only to return and find the phrases erased or sticky notes with passive aggressive comments stuck to their doors.

"It's not like the act of erasing stuff is the issue, because that's relatively inconsequential," Jane said. "The issue is that the people who are erasing stuff have been targeting the boards belonging to black students or queer students."

Colleen Bunn, assistant director of residence life, agreed that while many of the allegations posed against girls in the RedHawk Traditions LLC seem to hold sway, the Office of Residence Life (ORL) has yet to hold someone accountable.

"This has been particularly targeting our students of color, our students who may not fit in the gender binary, our gay students," Bunn said. "Those are true factors. What we're having issues with is we don't know who is exactly doing those things."

Jane said the harassment climaxed last Wednesday when several girls from the RedHawk Traditions LLC loudly vocalized their feelings in the corridor kitchenette. Jane said the girls said things like, "I hate living with the black girls on this floor" and "I don't like them throwing their blackness in my face."

"Everybody in the hall could hear this," Jane said. "When that kind of discrimination is vocalized and obviously directed at certain people, that is automatically an issue. It's scary when you are a minority in a dorm and you have people who are very vocally against who you are fundamentally as a person. We have trans students who do not feel safe using the bathroom for fear of getting attacked."

In response to the kitchenette incident, ORL held an open dialogue for the corridor to discuss how the two LLCs could create a mutually inclusive environment. While Jane says the talk was helpful, both Jane and Bunn agree the issue remains unresolved.

"It's not a resolvable issue," Bunn said. "I think that is really hard for our students to understand. For those who are just seeing oppression for the first time and hearing it for the first time and dealing with those consequences and figuring out their white guilt, this is a tough conversation to handle."

Bunn said that while the things happening in Thomson are isolated to the corridor shared by the RedHawk Traditions and Social Justice LLCs, that doesn't mean they aren't happening on other parts of the campus.

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"I think that systemic racism and sexism exists everywhere on our campus," Bunn said. "We have an obligation as a community to address it in whatever ways that we can."

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