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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Parrott right to show support by urging students to attend demonstration

On Thursday, David Parrott, the vice president for Student Affairs, sent out an email urging students to go to the Enough is Enough Peaceful Demonstration on Friday. Parrott wrote, “It is incomprehensible that violence against Black people across the nation continues.”

Not all students were happy with this email. This past Friday, the Alligator published a letter by a student who criticized Parrott’s email for being factually incorrect and for being sent out on a student-wide server.

The student, John Jones, called out Parrott’s facts but himself failed to compare the rate that black people are killed by police as compared to their proportion of the population.

While the letter alleged that Parrott overstepped his boundaries as the vice president for Student Affairs, this simply isn’t true. Both urging students to attend the demonstration and attending himself, along with UF President Kent Fuchs and Dr. Jen Day Shaw, the associate vice president and dean of students, were important steps to show they care about black students.

It’s good to have an administration who cares deeply about their minority students, because what happens when they don’t? Well, we just have to dig into UF’s history to find out.

According to UF’s Black Affairs website, when the Black Student Union made a list of demands in April 1971 for “programs and initiatives to improve the campus climate for Black students,” including a Black Cultural Center, former UF President Stephen O’Connell refused to act on the demands. This resulted in an occupation of the president’s office April 15, 1971, or Black Thursday, during which 67 students were suspended.

The fact that student protests of this scale were required to get black students a space on campus shows how bad the administration was at meeting the needs of minority students.

That’s not the only case of administration working against the tide of social justice. According to the Gainesville Sun, in 2012 students pushed for a renaming of the student union because of J. Wayne Reitz’s legacy of delaying integration at UF and purging of LGBTQ+ students. Former Vice President for Students Affairs Dave Kratzer “cautioned against applying values from today to the tumultuous historical period during which Reitz was president.”

Reitz believed LGBTQ+ students shouldn’t be at UF, just as O’Connell believed black students shouldn’t have their own cultural center, and both were wrong because they didn’t think of students’ needs first.

These cases occurred in UF’s recent past and it’s too soon to disregard them. In both cases, administrators expressed a political opinion — maybe not one for a political party, but one that deeply affected minorities.

Are those OK because they do not challenge privileged identities?

The student who wrote the letter would rather us go back to a time when minority concerns weren’t given much thought. Administration is there to help students — not to sit idly by while they suffer.

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David Parrott is the vice president of all Student Affairs, not just of the students who have enough privilege that they don’t have to think about police violence against black people. Parrott has taken a much needed step to bring light to this issue. In fact, it would be inappropriate had he not spoken out.

As Isiah Thomas said, “White silence is the equivalent to violence in these issues.”

Nicole Dan is a UF political science junior. Her column appears on Mondays.

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