Blackface on Campus

I’m a senior at SUNY Purchase, a small state school located just outside of NYC. Here is a letter I sent to my college’s president as well as other faculty and staff. I came across photos of students at my school who were at one point active in the GLBT community wearing blackface. Yet another drop in the unfortunate bucket of recent blackface on college campuses.

Dear President Schwarz and Ravi Rajan:

Let me first thank you both for the President’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts that I’ve received. I look forward to meeting you, President Schwarz, at the award ceremony on Monday, and I feel so incredibly honored and humbled.

However, I’m writing to you to talk about something that no one likes to talk about: race and diversity at Purchase. Though I love this school dearly, I have often felt isolated as a woman of color, being one of two people of color of the senior printmakers, and frequently being the only person of color in my classes. I’ve never had a professor from a non-white background, and I think that there is only one faculty member of color in the entire visual arts program, Michael Puryear. I don’t talk about this isolation much, because people say things like, “You’re just a woman of color complaining about being a woman of color,” or, “It’s really not that bad.”

But it is that bad. Though I know it’s beyond anyone’s immediate control, this school is predominantly white, especially the VA. Tonight I came across some highly disturbing images (from January 2009) on Facebook of white Purchase College students hanging out, having fun, and putting on blackface. I’ve attached a few for you to look at. There are about forty more. I know some of these students by name and one of them is in my year and major. These students still go here and some of them are pretty active members in the community.

I think that as leaders of this community, you should know that these kinds of things happen here. This is why I’ve also sent this message to a few other people who I think have a strong impact on this campus. Despite how much we pride our school on being a place where everyone feels welcome, it’s not the case. I’m actually crying as I’m writing this. I hate that I know people who think blackface and racial mimicry is a funny joke. I hate that I respected these people before I found these photos. I hate that this is going to forever mar my memory of Purchase College, even though I only have one week of classes left.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but we need to do something about it. Firstly, let me suggest a campus-wide email that mentions that photos of students wearing blackface have been found, and that the college does not condone this kind of behavior in any way. The email should also talk about cultivating a community of acceptance, and a community free of discrimination. I would also recommend doing some kind of effective diversity training on campus in the coming year. There are some people I can put you in touch with who would be glad to help. I do not want to publicly identify or punish the individuals who participated in this, which is why I’ve refrained from mentioning their names. But I think it’s important that Purchase students know these things happen. It is to your discretion whether you want to mention this incident to the campus, but I strongly recommend it.

I will be publishing this letter and a few of the photographs (I will blur the faces when I do this) to a few websites. I trust that you will respect my choice to tell people about this. We live in a culture rife with covert, and sometimes not so covert, racism. There is no excuse for such behavior. It is our responsibility as members of this community to call each other out when we say or do the wrong thing, and to take incidents like this as experiences we can learn and grow from.

Sincerely,

Aiyana Isabel Knauer