I graduated from Claremont McKenna last May. I've been trying to find a way to understand my feelings over the past couple of days and it's difficult. In the four years I was there, I never once met someone I would call a racist. Ever. But is surreal seeing these people talk about this. I've seen most of the people in this video, even spoken with them at times and they are all kind, intelligent, and fun people. I know one of the girls who went on the hunger strike. But I also feel for the girls whose Halloween photos and apologies were made public against their will and used as a symbol for something that ultimately wrapped them in something much more complicated and inescapable. While I didn't care much for the Dean of Students one way or another, I still don't agree with the way she was bullied out because she said a student didn't fit the typical CMC mold (a term that students had brought to her to describe when they felt out of place from the typical CMC student ie. driven, intelligent, and loves having a good time). Reading about the similar situations at Yale and Mizzou, the journalist Conor Friedersdorf sums up my major concern with this vague ideas of a "safe space"

"While hardly a cure-all, embarking on a series of discrete improvements (if black students are stopped by the cops more often than white students, why is that? what would it take to remedy that?) strikes me as more beneficial than demanding that administrators validate student pain, especially since students are bound for adult life, where validation of authorities is unavailable. It is within painful awareness of racism's persistence, not ignorance or apathy or a desire to divert attention from it, that I reaffirm a belief that resilience is among the most valuable things anyone can learn in an institution of higher education. I may be wrong that students are being robbed of resilience and disempowered by mistaken ideological assumptions, as I've argued in recent articles. But right or not, my position is not a distraction from the matter of their well-being. It is my notion of how young people best secure it, and to frame it otherwise is the diversion."

New to reddit and unsure to link the article as text, but here is the URL for any interested http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/race-and-the-anti-free-speech-diversion/415254/