Thursday, March 24, 2016

Conor Friedersdorf ― A Dialogue on Race and Speech at Yale

An undergraduate and staff writer at The Atlantic exchange contrasting perspectives on the protests that roiled the campus last fall.

The libertarian thinker and staff writer for The Atlantic writes: Last semester, as Yale students engaged in activism about race on campus, The New Journal, a student publication, dedicated a portion of its print run to three essays on being black at the institution: “Skin Like Soil” by Dave Harris, “Look and See” by Taylor Eldridge, and “On Shame and Moving Forward” by Bria Godley.

The final author wrote, "A lot of white people have asked me what they can do to be a good ally to the women of color on this campus and my typical spiel is that they should just talk about race. It seems small, but it is not, because white people can choose to ignore race. They are so afraid of saying something wrong when it comes up that they don’t address it." I've found conversation of that sort useful in the past, so I wrote Godley to see if she'd be interested in talking with me about race, via email. I asked her to kick off the conversation in whatever way she found most useful.""

Read the full article HERE