‘My grief is real. Your grief is real, and we’re not alone’
Amherst College students upset at Donald Trump’s presidential victory gathered a few days after the election to share their “anger and grief” in a community gripe fest.
Throughout the confab, participants chanted that Trump is a “fascist,” “racist,” and “sexist.”
Rally organizer Willow Delp told fellow student activists that people “are seeing this country’s ugliest self come to light — its legacy as a racist, sexist settler colony,” The Amherst Student reports. (Delp is a managing opinion editor of the paper.)
“It is the profound hatred of the other, deeply ingrained in American society centuries in the making,” Delp said. “We stand together to say that this is unacceptable.”
Delp further claimed this hatred manifested itself via a “recent uptick in hate speech across the country” such as racist text messages sent to black students at various U.S. colleges.
Gracie Rowland of the group Reproductive Justice Alliance implored female (and, presumably, female-identifying) rally attendees to “get [the pill], put it in your bag, and just have it in case someone needs it because we don’t know what kind of times we’ll be entering.” (In Massachusetts, abortion is legal up to 26 weeks.)
The Amherst Young Democratic Socialists’ Isabelle Anderson told the crowd “My grief is real. Your grief is real, and we’re not alone. We will not let our college convince us today that things are normal.”
Amherst student August Selvaggio, who identifies as transgender, said he was upset after hearing a peer say November 5’s results “didn’t matter at all,” and that everyone should just “go back to our lives”: “I just decided that I needed a place to be angry right now,” Selvaggio said.
A number of students at the rally also expressed dismay at the college’s handling of the election, including the decision to hold classes on the day following the results.
“Like many of you, we’ve been very disappointed by the lack of response by the administration. Them sending an email the night before election night and saying, ‘Sorry you’re anxious. Here’s counseling center open hours,’ and then not saying anything the day after, when people were literally crying in class and in public, really sucked,” said Anderson.
Students also claimed the results of the election had left them so upset that attending classes felt inappropriate.
“I haven’t gone to class in two days because none of my professors talked about what was happening, and that was really upsetting,” Anderson added.
One student, however, was thankful her French teacher just “sat in silence with us” after the election and “asked how we were feeling.” The student said she left class thinking “I got this.”
Amherst Interfaith and Humanist Chaplain Wade Boswell (pictured), “a white, queer, non-binary mystic” according to “their” faculty page, attended the rally in solidarity with students, saying “I’m feeling the same grief that you are feeling, which is why I wanted to be here.”
MORE: Amherst College students upset that campus police unmarked their vehicles
IMAGES: Can We Take a Joke?/YouTube; Amherst College
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