Title: What happened at Evergreen State? | SocialistWorker.org
Headings: What happened at Evergreen State?
What happened at Evergreen State?
Content: Students rally against racism at Evergreen State College (The Cooper Point Journal)
Tensions between students and the administration have been high for some time, with, just in the past, women on campus protesting how staff conduct rape investigations; Black students objecting to inadequate training and over-arming of the campus police; and LGBT students challenging the understaffing of the trans and queer center. A majority of students has been sympathetic to these grievances. These tensions came to a head following the night of May 14, after two Black students were woken in their dorm by officers at 11 p.m. and taken to campus police headquarters, where they were questioned until 2 a.m.
The interrogation stemmed from an online Facebook debate about what many people perceived to be a racist comment--and, later, an in-person argument in the cafeteria, though many witnesses stated it "was very far from physical." Police singled out the Black students involved in the debate for hours of questioning, yet never formally detained the two or charged them with anything. The following day, 100 protesters assembled near the campus administration building to stand up against this act of police harassment. "Students involved cited the general distrust and dislike for police services, the administration and the general treatment of [people of color] on campus as reasons for gathering," read a report in the Cooper Point Journal, Evergreen's student-run newspaper. MEANWHILE, BRET Weinstein, a professor of biology at Evergreen, wrote an e-mail that would dominate media coverage of the Evergreen controversy afterward. Weinstein's e-mail objected to a change in a campus tradition called the "Day of Absence," in which, in the past, staff and students of color left campus and congregated separately.