Black Lives Can't Be Bothered - Protest Against Williams College Safety and Security Fizzles Out

WILLIAMS COLLEGE, MA - In one of the more humorous stories in this week's Williams Record is a brief article which describes how the previously all consuming effort to restrain and investigate the supposedly racist Williams College Campus Safety and Security (CSS) department has evaporated like steam on a dry sunny day.

Laughably, only five participants showed up at a recent listening event regarding the CSS. According to the Williams Record staff reporter, Lucy Walker, the meeting was stacked with pro-CSS students, most of them had come in order to listen to those with differing opinions. In fact, one of the major takeaways from the pro-CSS student's comments was their "...frustration with what they perceived to be the tendency of debates on campus to be one-sided. The majority of the participants had come hoping to change that culture and provide an opposing perspective."

The pro-CSS students asserted the CSS cared about the student body and was just trying to do its job. “I’ve worked with them for three years now. I think what some students don’t understand is that their only concern is the safety and well-being of the students,” said Nick Landry ’21. “They have people who work there who are retired and come in part-time because they genuinely enjoy doing what they do.”

This was pathetic denouement for a cause which black students on campus had tightly embraced, seeking to establish hatred for the Williams College CSS on par with what outside activists had ginned up through the Black Lives Matter movement.

For example, Isaiah Blake ’21 described the POC community as a “magnet” for CSS, at a Black Student Town Hall event in November 2018.

Blake, as you may recall, was the high-visibility CARE Now student leader who this year became frustrated at a CC meeting because of the rules and regulations which he perceived slowed down the fulfillment of a simple request which he artfully described as: "To have niggers sit in the fucking quad and eat hot dogs."

In a pale imitation of the Black Lives Matter protests, black students complained that they felt "unsafe" around CSS officers. According to an earlier report in the Williams Record, "Some examples of alarming behavior that attendees gave included POC-organized parties, where room capacity was arbitrarily and significantly lowered on more than one occasion, as well as examples of condescending and rude tones some CSS officers have taken with POC."

The listening event was part of a larger effort to solicit student opinions regarding CSS which was conducted by Margolis Healy, a campus security consulting firm, hired to conduct an external review process of the College’s campus safety and security (CSS).

On student, Eli Cytrynbaum ’20, a member of Minority Coalition’s (MinCo) steering board, explained away the failure of anti-CSS students to gin up much support this year for their cause as due to the fact that "...people are very tired from last year and have issues from their home communities to deal with,” he said.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND.