I come to you today from a place of anger, but also of hope and love. I write this because I am upset and because it needs to be said, but also because I believe that love means speaking up when you are hurt and trusting that your words will not fall on deaf ears.

As an institution, Bowdoin has failed people of color and will continue to do so if we don’t take immediate action. Yes, as a person of color I have had many happy moments at Bowdoin and received various benefits that come with belonging to this institution, but that does not make the way the College deals with race—or rather doesn’t deal with it—acceptable. 

Bowdoin, as a small community, reflects the racial issues of inequality that have brought people across the U.S. and the world to the streets to demand change.

The fact that women of color are the most dissatisfied group on campus, that the Outing Club—Bowdoin’s largest club on campus—is overwhelmingly white, that students continue to dress up like Native Americans, Mexicans and other oppressed people, all show that Bowdoin has a long way to go in making this a campus where people of all races are at home and where there is racial equality. 

We do need to create more awareness, but we also need the College administration to take actions that uphold values of racial equality and justice. Why hasn’t the College taken a public stance on the issues of racial inequality that have been brought to the public’s attention by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson? 

At a time when the community of color is in mourning over the deaths of its youth and the terrible reactions of the country and justice system to these deaths, Bowdoin has been cold and silent. 

I don’t want to keep talking about how race is a problem; about how it made me feel when an officer in St. Louis asked me for my Social Security number; about the fear in my body when I heard the KKK was heading to Ferguson where my family was protesting; about when a Bowdoin student asked me if I was just some Mexican; about when some of my closest friends left crying from Crack House because it was too hard to see students dressed up like Native Americans right in their faces.

I want students to continue connecting with each other and the community around them about issues of race, but more than that, I want my college to implement policies that won’t allow the same things to keep happening over and over again. 

I am a Latina and a Native American student, and I wonder if Bowdoin will ever be a home for me the way it is for a white, wealthy male student. I don’t want the College to tell me that it cares about diversity—I want it to show me that it does. 

Some Bowdoin students, including myself, have planned events around Mike Brown’s death—there’s been a shoe memorial, a vigil and discussions—and around other issues of race like cultural appropriation, but we need the College to support us. 

I want Bowdoin to make more conscious efforts to integrate this campus and reach out to people for whom this college was not initially made: people of color, people who are not straight, low-income students and women. I want the College to make a public statement that Bowdoin has solidarity with people of color at this difficult time. I also want the College not to allow the athletes who dressed up as Native Americans at Crack to participate in the rest of their season.

I ask students to please ask themselves these questions before raising their eyebrows and dismissing what I’ve proposed: What does it mean when a student can dress up as a Native American or “dirty Mexican” and just get a stern talk, while plagiarism can get a student kicked out of school? What purpose does this type of sanctioning serve? What does the College accept and what doesn’t it? What does this mean about our institution and our values?

The College’s silence around the justice system’s failure to indict Darren Wilson and its failure to implement consequences when issues of race arise show that Bowdoin as an institution either doesn’t understand the problem of race or doesn’t care about it as much as it cares about other issues. And this is unacceptable.  

Caroline Martinez is a member of the Class of 2016.