ICView Magazine

The deaths of George Floyd, BreonnaTaylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have sparked a lot of feeling and reflection in Yetunde Smalls ’21.

“I’ve been overwhelmed with emotion,” she said. “I was in middle school when Trayvon Martin was killed, and then a few years later Sandra Bland was killed, and I thought they were these snapshots where people were made aware of how Black people were brutalized, but it seemed like they grew numb to it. Now it’s happening on a global level, and people are reacting. I’m hoping that as a global community we can create initiatives and change minds.”

Smalls is not alone in wanting global change. But she’s also focused on the changes that she can make on the Ithaca College campus. As a former student trustee on the Ithaca College Board of Trustees, a current MLK scholar, a 2020 Newman Civic Fellow, and a senator for the class of 2021, she sees opportunity. However, she knows change happens in stages. One of the first things that has to happen is a willingness to communicate.

“As a community, we’re so nervous to offend and ask questions of each other, it creates a barrier,” Smalls said. “I think if as a community we move past that, we can come to an understanding. One of the things that would be helpful is finding the commonality in our differences. At our core, we have a lot of similarities ,and we have something that drove us to IC. We should embrace those.”

Increased communication is a first step, but for Ithaca College to move closer to being an antiracist campus, Smalls wants to see structural changes as well, starting at the classroom level. “We want to make people feel welcome and like they have spaces where they will be validated for what they have to say,” she said. “But at the same time, we want to make sure they aren’t tokenized, and we really listen.”

The line between welcoming and tokenizing is a critical one to recognize. “If an instructor makes a comment that, as a person of color, you feel is directed at you, you feel the eyes on you and a pressure to respond,” Smalls said. “But other people need to understand that you’re not the spokesperson for all people of color.”

Smalls said that she’s starting to see professors make progress on these types of issues. In July, hundreds of white faculty members posted a letter to Intercom addressed to students, faculty, and staff of color in support of Black Lives Matter. In the portion directed to students, the letter acknowledged, among other things, that students have experienced “microaggressions and outright racism” in the classroom, and that “many departments’ curricula have centered whiteness, white authors, and white experiences.” The faculty members pledged to make changes to their classes to address those failings.