In an effort to address the racial climate on campus, members of minority organizations will take the floor at Wednesday’s Student Senate meeting to discuss ways to address incidents like the one reported on Feb. 9.
After reports surfaced of racial slurs being directed at touring high-schoolers, off-campus student senator Adam Brennan began work on a campaign to confront racial issues on campus. Brennan reached out to the Council for Minority Student Affairs and the Texas A&M chapter of the NAACP and encouraged members to come speak at Wednesday’s Student Senate meeting. Brennan said there needs to be a more interactive response from the students.
“The whole point of the campaign is to basically gather stories from different organizations and different students explaining different racist events or inappropriate racial language, or anything that students felt uncomfortable with,” Brennan said. “If we can encourage more students to stand up for other students and say, ‘Hey, that’s not cool,’ — we need to do more to make sure that everyone feels at home at Texas A&M.”
Brennan plans to post the stories collected from the minority students around campus. He also plans to introduce legislation at Wednesday’s meeting that aims at encouraging more minority students to apply for student leadership positions.
“There’s an executive cabinet bill that I wrote that will require the student body president, if no minority candidates apply for one of the executive cabinet positions, [to] send an email out to all of Texas A&M, and especially to student leaders of the President’s Inclusion Council, saying, ‘Hey, we really want more people to apply and give other students a chance,’” Brennan said.
Aaron Mitchell, speaker of the Student Senate, said the incident involving the high school students was negative for the campus climate and he hopes to address the issue.
“Usually a change in the campus climate will come from the bottom up — from students to the administration — and I think there are a number of conversations we can have in our student community,” Mitchell said. “There’s also a number of other things that we can all think about, such as diversity training for all students, having different programs at our new student conference that address these issues and things like that.”
Students who want to submit cases of racism as part of the project should email [email protected] if they want to get involved.