Black Students at Amherst College File Complaint After ‘Community Safety Assistants’ Show Up at Party
“enforcing the rules for all the students or just for the Black students”
The ‘Community Safety Assistants’ were created as an alternative to campus police. Who did these students complain to? The campus police.
The College Fix reports:
Black Amherst College partygoers file ‘identity-based harm’ complaint against safety officers
Members of an Amherst College student organization filed an “identity-based harm” complaint against two “Community Safety Assistants” after they twice showed up “unannounced” at the group’s formal celebration last month.
According to The Amherst Student, some of the all-black attendees at the Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC) formal testified that the appearance of the Community Safety Assistants (CSAs) was “unnecessarily prolonged” and that their “aggressive mannerisms” resulted in partygoers feeling “harassed” and in “extreme discomfort.”
Ironically, the CSA program was created in response to students “feeling overly surveilled” by the campus police, with Amherst President Biddy Martin noting the CSAs were part of “a new approach to public safety.”
Just two days ago, the college posted a CSA want ad on Linkedin which notes a CSA “works to intentionally build community within a diverse community.” Part of the CSA’s job is to maintain a “circulating presence within and across residence halls to intervene with noise complaints, social gatherings, disputes between residents.”
This appears to be just what the CSAs were doing at the DASAC event. Note that the Student reports the DASAC formal was not officially registered (allegedly due to Amherst “mismanagement”), that there were a “high number” of other formals taking place at the same time as the DASAC’s, and that the DASAC allegedly had violated campus event alcohol policy.
Regarding the last point, one student even admitted “We were more fine with [the CSA taking the alcohol] because we understood that that was a mistake on our part that we didn’t know about.”
Nevertheless, formal attendees were miffed at how the CSAs conducted themselves. As the CSAs were confiscating alcohol (some of which, according to those present, was not out in the open but hidden in students’ bags), student Bridget Carmichael asked them why they were being “snitches” and if they were “enforcing the rules for all the students or just for the Black students.”
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Comments
This is always going to be a problem. Even when rules are enforced completely equally, people who have a memory of being subject to selective enforcement are going to be convinced that they are seeing it again, and that people from the privileged class would not have been treated the same way.
We see it all the time right here in this forum, where every time a rule is enforced against a Republican people are convinced that had it been a Democrat they’d have been allowed to get away with it, and every time a Democrat gets away with something they are convinced that had it been a Republican they’d have had the book thrown at them. The fact that this is sometimes true just reinforces the paranoid feeling that it’s always true, and makes it impossible to prove it isn’t.
Videlicit Senator Tim Scott, than whom there are few people more conservative, saying that he has been stopped by DC police for “Driving While Black”. I don’t believe that has actually happened to him; I believe that each time he’s been stopped, a white person in his position would have been stopped too, but that’s impossible to prove because there’s only one of him and he isn’t white. And I understand why he feels that way, because it probably did happen to him when he was younger, and it almost certainly used to happen regularly to his parents.
I read the student newspaper article. First of all, Biddy Martin spent most of her career at Cornell, eventually rising to Provost.
Second, you have three entitled Karens who were part of an unregistered party in a Amherst building which served hard alcohol, although Amherst, like most schools, banned hard alcohol on campus. What sanctions will Amberst take against the student organization for the illegal hard alcohol parrty? If it were a fraternity instead of the “the Dance and Step at Amherst College” they would be suspended.
Third, ” “I told [one of the CSAs], ‘I’m a member of the Community Standards Review Board [CSRB] and the Black Student Union, so I know that Amherst has a history of systemic racism.” This is like the case of the town councilwoman harassing a policeman during a routine traffic stop of her daughter. A member of the Community Standards Review Board should know the event registration and alcohol rules, and should work to keep any event that she is involved with completely compliant.
If there was any racism here, it was the students who harassed the CSAs.
From the website, “The CSRB (formerly known as the Committee on Discipline) is the College’s adjudication board for allegations of intellectual responsibility violations and for other violations that do not relate to the College Sexual Misconduct Policy. Comprised of a pool of students, staff, and faculty, a panel of the CSRB will be convened if a Respondent does not accept responsibility and (1) wishes to be heard before a panel (instead of a single adjudicator) or (2) if a Respondent’s responsibility determination suggests a sanction that is potentially in excess of one semester of suspension.” So if the Karen pleads “not guilty”, her case will be heard by the CSRB, although by a panel that would not include her.
Again, how could a CSRB member seriously claim to be unaware of the rule that bans hard alcohol from on-campus parties? Maybe she was misquoted and meant to say “I’m a member of the CSRB and know that Amherst has a history of systematically throwing the book at people who smuggle hard alcohol into parties. We are so busted.”
My, my, my! What GOOD little nazis this college is developing!
“Nevertheless, formal attendees were miffed at how the CSAs conducted themselves. As the CSAs were confiscating alcohol (some of which, according to those present, was not out in the open but hidden in students’ bags), student Bridget Carmichael asked them why they were being “snitches” and if they were “enforcing the rules for all the students or just for the Black students.”
So, basically she tried to start shit and get people riled up, then got mad at the CSAs for their behavior? Sounds like they have cause for going after her for trying to pick a fight and possibly enjoin other drunk partygoers into your quarrels, but they exercised restraint.
I swear the complete lack of self-awareness in the usual suspects of shit talkers on campus is maddening…but why would they change when no one curbs their behaviors with discipline?