Evergreen events mirror the nation

I am a recent grad student of The Evergreen State College. I didn’t understand the student unrest at Evergreen myself until a fellow student mentioned the following to me a month ago.

The very responsible, masculine, and kind student spoke broken-heartedly of his friend who was shot and paralyzed here in west Olympia after a suspected incident of shop lifting. Whatever the circumstances, this sharp minority student simply wanted to know why events like this continue to happen in communities across America.

In recent days, a three-months pregnant minority woman with known mental health issues was shot and killed in her apartment in Seattle. I am coming to understand that events like this contribute to our young, minority students becoming emotionally charged about what they perceive as threats to their safety.

Fact: Evergreen students became emotionally charged about an instructor’s public misinterpretation of a public email. Fact: For whatever reason, the science instructor did not do the math I did to recognize that there were only 200 seats for the off-campus by-invitation event for 4,000 people. Perceiving it as a mandate may have been caused by hasty reading. This occurred in an environment where, not since the 1960s (and thanks to social media), have minority students been so aware of widespread deaths, injuries, and arrests of minority individuals.

I’m not defending our students’ actions. I’m trying to understand it in a context of what is happening nationally.

This story was originally published June 30, 2017 at 4:11 PM with the headline "Evergreen events mirror the nation."