What the Duke is going on in Allen?

Sorry, administration, this isn’t your regular Duke/UNC walk-up line

For those of you playing catch-up, here’s what you need to know about Duke’s latest student protests:

  • Two years ago, there was an incident during a football game in which Duke’s executive vice president Tallman Trask allegedly hit parking attendant Shelvia Underwood with his car, and used a racial slur against her.
  • Track denied the slur, but last month Underwood filed a lawsuit against him, though there wasn’t enough evidence for the case to go through. There were several witnesses that saw the Trask hit Underwood, but no one was close enough to hear anything.
  • On Friday, April 1st, nine students occupied the inside of the Allen building on Duke’s west campus, where President Brodhead’s office is located. These students were granted amnesty on Sunday night – meaning they wouldn’t get arrested or face legal consequences for their actions – and they remain there still.
  • The administration has announced that if the students willingly leave the building, peaceful negotiations will continue, but until then, the Allen building is closed. No classes were held there today, and none will be held there tomorrow.

What do they want?

What started off as nine students in the building is now a campsite on the quad facing Allen. I guess Duke kids really love sleeping in tents, whether in support of our basketball players or in protest of our administration.

The students hung up a list of their demands on their campsite, and so far, two of them have been reached: amnesty, and a public apology from Trask.

Other demands include a $15 minimum wage for all workers – Duke’s current minimum wage of $12 is already $4.50 higher than the state minimum – as well as the immediate termination of Trask and two other administrators.

Will they get what they want?

Probably not. The students may be fighting a noble cause, but they don’t have much support. Duke kids may be willing to sleep in tents for months before a basketball game, but not many have stood up in solidarity with these new campers. 

General consensus is mostly uneducated about what exactly is going on and why these kids are protesting, and that’s the problem: If you’re going to sit-in a building for an indefinite amount of days and risk getting arrested, not to mention having to miss class and give up all your other responsibilities for however long, you better be absolutely sure that every squirrel and frat boy on this campus know why you’re doing it. This simply isn’t the case with the Allen sit-in.

Other than the protesters themselves and their few activist friends and allies, no one really cares about Trask’s alleged racial slur two years ago. It doesn’t hit home, and it’s unfortunately not a big enough case of discrimination to bring lots of people in to protest.

The demand for a $15 minimum wage is also a touchy subject, because they’re not only protesting racism on the part of Duke’s administration, they’re calling for a full on Bernie Sanders-style revolution. Few students are going to be on board with setting up shop behind that list of demands.

Why did this happen?

If you ask me, the mounting racial tension on campus was bound to explode at some point. Socially and often politically, Duke students are completely divided by race, and that has nothing to do with bad intentions. It has to do with the way our social structures are set up.

If you’re white, you rush for the dominantly white sororities, and if you’re black, you rush for the strictly black ones. Some SLG’s have reputations for being “more international” than others, though “international” usually means “if you’re white you’re uncultured and unwelcome.” We are clearly very good at following the racial guidelines that have been set up for us, no matter how much everyone loves to criticize the system.

Even our activist groups are sharply divided. I’m pretty terrible at estimation, but I can guarantee you that the amount of non-black students involved with the Black Student Alliance or the amount of non-Muslims helping out with the Muslim Student Association is very close to zero. Students here fight against their own oppression, and that’s it.

So, provide the masses with an incident of a white, male, Duke administrator being racist towards a black female worker, and what do you get?

You get the kids who have been ready for a sit-in for months making all the rules, and they’re clearly making this a pretty radical game to play. You get the ones who are absolutely sick of the racial gridlines they’ve been living in for a semester and a half showing up in solidarity, because screw you, white administrator, this is all your fault. You have the somewhat conflicted majority, who doesn’t really know which direction to run in because yes, racism is unacceptable but do we really feel the Bern for that minimum wage demand?

And then there are the skeptics, who think these crazy radical campers need to pack up and go find other trees to hug (or burn down in protest). So as far as the students go, it’s a mess.

And as far as the administration goes, negotiations aren’t going to continue until the students willingly leave the building, and students won’t willingly leave the building until negotiations continue.

Better start looking for a new desk, Brodhead. This is a dead standstill.

Will these students change anything?

I don’t know about the $15 minimum wage, but there is an important conversation to be had here about race and the divisive society we exist in here at Duke.

The next few days will tell whether we’re ready to start talking about it, or whether kids are just going to keep walking past those tents like it’s another season of Duke basketball.

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