BC Allies, the LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning) advocacy group on campus, held their annual Pride Week this past week. Unfortunately, the event did not kick off with a good start. Before discussing this, here is a list of events of what has been happening on campus and around the area within the past few weeks:

• Back in February, a racially motivated fight had broken out outside of the Heritage and Wright dorm buildings due to a white student yelling racial slurs and insults at a group of black students who were walking by at the time.
• Several weeks ago, a Bridgewater Alumni, Jeff Mathews, had passed away. He was a member of a historically black fraternity at James Madison University. As a tribute, the members of his fraternity painted a rock with his fraternity information. Less that six hours after that, the rock was painted over in white, with the words “TRUMP 2016” and “#TRUMPTRAIN” on it.
• Several days after that, in a bathroom in Memorial Hall (an academic building at Bridgewater College) someone had written on the wall the symbols reportedly signifying Omega Psi Phi (Jeff Mathews Fraternity) followed by a racially derogatory slur, followed by “are darkies.”
• Asian Student Association, a club on campus that is in the process of attempting to become official, with the goal of celebrating and spreading awareness of Asian culture, has been attempting to gain members for the past few months. Recently, there has been a lot of negative reactions among students to them. The general response they have been getting is that there should not be an Asian student association, because there is not a white student association.
• For several days last week, a number of students began tagging Bridgewater’s campus with “Trump 2016” in an effort to get a rise out of people. It worked. A lot of students had spoken out about this, some of which even erased the tags and began chalking positive messages around campus. One Latina student had brought this up in one of her classes saying that if the people doing this are trying to express their political views then fine, but if they are doing it to spread hate, then that isn’t OK. Her classmates had suggested to her that she was only upset because she is not white.
• Pride week had begun with a lot more repetitive incidents. Some of the members of BC Allies were being followed around, laughed at and had pictures taken of them. Allies had put up a rainbow background to one of the walls outside of the cafeteria with new information on it every day about the LGBTQ community and positive notes being put up. Every day this wall had been vandalized in some way. BC Allies posters around campus had also been ripped up along with the wall.
• The most recent negative event were the series of fights breaking out on the app Yik Yak, an anonymous social media website. People began calling members of BC Allies out by name telling them how awful people think they are. It was also said on the app through a number of posts that Pride Week should not exist because there is not a “Straight Pride Week,” that Allies should stop throwing their identities in everyone’s faces, and that Allies shouldn’t exist at all because this is a Christian College.

After all of these events, the minority clubs on campus (Asian Student Association, BC Allies, Black Student Association, and Latino Student Association) had a meeting before a convocation on Wednesday of last week. A lot of faculty and staff had attended as well. At this meeting, students voiced their concerns and complaints and together, attempted to come up with some solution. The general consensus was that whatever kind of reaction was to be had, it had to be positive. Hate cannot be defeated with more hate. Out of this meeting, several people were selected to be a part of a committee specifically to bring the minority groups together in order to spread peace to the rest of the campus. They named themselves “The Diversity League.”

The first mission of the Diversity League was to have a message of peace out on the campus mall. The president of the college, the college chaplain, a number of professors, the adviser for all the minority clubs, and a bunch of students came out to support peace. After this, BC Allies had their annual talent show. Students, faculty, and staff all came out to support BC Allies. One of the most notable things that had happened during was one of the acts had speed painted the following picture to send a message to the campus:

The picture shows a woman standing in front of a wall holding a sponge in one hand with the year “1969” written on it and a bucket with a heart on it in the other. The artist explained that half of the wall was meant to symbolize the Stonewall Riots in which a number of LGBT individuals came together to fight discrimination, the other half was meant to symbolize the Trump tags being spread around campus. She stated her fear of what had happened with Stonewall was happening with us as well.

The capstone of Pride week was Allies having a lunch with Alumni this past Saturday. It was at this event that former students had shared stories of their time on campus and explained how proud they are of how well Allies is doing and how far they have come. I myself had a conversation for about two hours with an older lesbian couple who had sworn they would never come back to Bridgewater, and how happy they are that they changed their minds.

The thing to take away from this article is that while there is a lot of hateful sentiment, not just on this campus, but all across the nation, not everyone is interested in spreading this hate. The support that BC Allies had gotten from administration and students, the willingness for students to come together to fight discrimination, and the proud reaction shared by the alumni here shows that while we are in a time in which so much violence and hate is being shown through the media, people are not inherently bad. Attacking others for holding different views is not the way to go about fixing a problem. Educating others and encouraging love (as cheesy as that sounds) seems to be the most effective way to deal with a problem.