Recall the fascinating degree of snowflakery exhibited when students at Brown University moaned about the travails of campus activism.
Now, it’s the University of Oklahoma’s turn.
“I never realized how emotionally draining and stressful this work would be,” says Ariel Ray, leader of the college’s “Brown Collective” group.
“You look at other people in your community and you assume that they’re gonna be with (the movement), but they’re not.”
One of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Ayanna Poole, related how “tough” it was during the hunger strike of Jonathan Butler at the University of Missouri. (Butler is from a very wealthy Omaha, Nebraska family who went on the strike to “bring attention to marginalized students.”)
“[…] it was ‘the most stressful week of my life’ and […] she ‘only slept 10 hours that entire week and never went to class.’ She and her friends rallied behind the movement with everything they had, fighting through tears if that’s what it took.”
Many OU activists on the panel with Poole felt like her words truly hit home with them, especially Indigenize OU member and philosophy sophomore Sydne Gray. Gray was initially not invited to be a part of the discussion panel, but was invited to the stage after expressing herself from the audience.
“I consider my community to be these people — the activists,” Gray said after conveying how difficult it is to deal with the university administration.
Other panel members, including Lena Tenney and David Martin from Queer Inclusion on Campus at OU and Bradley Mays from OU Disability Inclusion and Awareness, also provided stories of what they have gone through at OU, and why they are determined more than ever to fight for their causes.
When Mays was a freshman living in the OU residence halls, he said he was treated far from how he should have been.
“Where do you think I lived in the towers?” Mays, who uses a wheelchair, asked the audience. “You would think the first floor. I lived on the sixth floor.”
Mays then recounted a fire drill that occurred while he was in his room one day. He said he wasn’t able to move, and was finally forced to use an elevator to reach the bottom floor.
“God forbid you develop a disability, but chances are you will at some point in your life. You don’t want to be treated differently,” Mays said.
That last statement appears to be a bit of a contradiction. Not to mention, did Mays ever inform the university of his sixth floor housing assignment? Or did he just fester with indignation … until that fire drill?
Queer Inclusion on Campus’s Tenney claimed that some of her professors had “targeted her” and had said “very transphobic things.”
BLM’s Poole referred to what activists deal with on campus as a “war.”
“In any war, you can win a battle, but still have a war to go through,” she said.
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