Hundreds of students crammed into Amherst College’s Robert Frost Library for a sit-in against racial injustice that turned into a confessional, as one black or Hispanic student after another rose to talk about feelings of alienation and invisibility on campus. In the heat of the moment, the students drafted a list of demands for the administration. They wanted the college to stop calling its athletes the Lord Jeffs, after Lord Jeffery Amherst, the pre-Revolutionary War British commander who advocated germ warfare against Native Americans and for whom this college town was named. They wanted students who had posted “Free Speech” and “All Lives Matter” posters to go through “extensive training for racial and cultural competency” and possibly discipline. They wanted the administration to apologize for “our institutional legacy of white supremacy,” among many other forms of discrimination, like “heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma and classism.”

November 28, 2015 ・ From The New York Times