Written in response to last week’s opinion which can be read here

The demands of students at Oberlin College & Conservatory, in context, speak to a rising tide of black students who are tired of being treated like second-class citizens in their own university.

Their demands summarize a problem so common, it has become cliché: white curricula, whether in music, history or literature, is a core requirement; black curricula in those same areas is an elective.

Their concerns for student workers are similar: benefits, better pay and treatment, shift meals for food service workers and some pay for organizers. I have heard every single one of them from Central students.

The other demands–more black faculty, tenure for black faculty, black financial aid workers and counselors who will be better able to relate to black students and their struggle–may be foreign to The Observer staff, but similar issues were articulated fairly recently at Central by a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in the SURC.

These students are asking for equality, to be treated with the same respect their white peers get–and you believe this is extremism?

The demands to fire President Gaudino for his excessive administrative raises while under a tuition freeze was backed by Central students and Observer staff, at the time. Why is it extremism only when the issue is racial?

They call this era, 400 years after slavery, “The New Jim Crow.” We still pay black Americans the lowest wages, strip them of their right to vote at consistent rates, discriminate against them for housing and employment and shuffle them into the worst housing districts.

We funnel less money into their schools and are even less likely to treat them in hospitals. Police are more ready to shoot an unarmed black teen than they are an armed militant terrorist, if that terrorist is white.

All over America, black men and women are incarcerated at higher rates, given longer sentences, and denied parole more often than whites.

Recently, there was a rash of “suicides” where black citizens would be detained for resisting arrest, despite having not committed a crime, and would then turn up dead in their cells to avoid a trial.

It comes down to this: you, as a white person, have no right to ever say that the reaction of a black person to the injustices they have suffered is too extreme.

You do not know their suffering, and you cannot know their suffering.

When you claim that blocking traffic is extremist, when the perpetrators of said traffic block have been suffering legal injustices for 400 years at the hands of white Americans, you perpetuate the problem.