It was as if Van Gogh had painted a picture-perfect fall scene to surround me as I way made my way back to American University on Saturday, October 10. The Weeknd’s final verse on Travis Scott’s “Pray 4 Love” emerged from my earbuds, as my weary legs trudged up the street from CVS. Saturday, October 10 was anything but a normal Saturday for me. I spent the early morning gearing up for the 25th Anniversary of the Million Man March and midday at the 5th & K Busboys and Poets for the #BlackPoetsSpeakOut event. It was only 5 p.m., but I was already tired. Tired from walking and tired from emotionally draining, significant racially centric events.
As I made my way up the street, I played the audience to a beautiful interaction taking place further up the street. Two teenage boys, one white, one black, joking around without a care in the world. I was immediately thrown back nearly eight years. It was as if I was watching my younger self with my best friend at the time, Stephen. At that point in time, we were like them. I knew more about the color of the autumn leaves changing than I did about the significance of having a white best friend, as a black male in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood. When Stephen moved to a different neighborhood, my best friend was again, white, this time a girl named Victoria. She was a girl. I was a guy. She played hockey. I played football. She liked punk. I liked R&B. She was black. I mean, I was black and she was white. To put it simply, I saw race as an adolescent because you can’t avoid it, but I didn’t see it to the extent that it affected my life until I got older.
Fast-forward again eight years to the present. I’m a young adult who is fully aware of the impacts of race and ethnicity in contemporary American society. I have six years of experience being the only black male in a classroom and nearly 20 years of experience being black in America. Therefore, I made the perfect candidate to help hang up posters that raised awareness about racially insensitive and threatening Yik Yak posts that had been made by American University students. However, those flyers were torn down by public safety in a matter of an hour. To be specific, on an early October morning, a group of concerned students hung up over 100 flyers that raised awareness about racially insensitive and threatening behavior around American University, but in under an hour, American University Public Safety took down nearly all of them. How is it that our university cares more about harmless flyers than it does other issues? When asked why they responded so quickly to these flyers being posted, public safety officers responded by saying that unapproved flyers that are not posted on bulletin boards must be taken down. However, this cannot be the only reason the flyers were taken down. A few weeks ago, a group of American University conservatives posted unapproved flyers in unapproved locations, and their flyers weren’t taken down for a few days. In addition, this past Thursday, I posted 10 concert posters at different shuttle stops around American University’s campus, and they still not have not been taken down.
Beyond the double standards of American University public safety, there has been a lot of buzz around the use of the hashtag, The Real AU. There is a sizable amount of American University students who feel that branding these racist Yik Yak posts with the hashtag #TheRealAU brands the university as a university with a racist student body. However, this is not the case. Branding these Yik Yak posts as The Real AU raises awareness that there are real, unaddressed issues regarding race on this campus. By hanging up these flyers, students aren’t saying that every last human being affiliated with American University is racist. They’re saying that they are tired of being marginalized, threatened and ignored by the administration, and many students on this campus. If American University wants to hang up pictures of black students in the center of Mary Graydon Center as a sign of diversity and culture, they need to start addressing the issues faced by black students on this campus. Who allows racist and threatening Yik Yaks to be posted without taking action? #TheRealAU. Who marginalizes Black students on this campus, but allows conservatives and other groups to speak freely? #TheRealAU. Who cares more about a controversial hashtag than it does about threats to its own community? #TheRealAU. Who’s not going to get the message and take action until a tragedy happens to one of its students? I hope it’s not the real American University.
