Racial State of Emergency

If one Googled "UCSD" and "Compton Cookout," you'll know what's been going on at my university for the past week, if you haven't heard already. Today, in my Filipino American Literature class, my professor dedicated the entire class time to discussing what happened and how students felt about it. I had a lot of thoughts going around in my head at the time, but didn't voice them out loud. Later, I sent an e-mail to my professor to tell him my thoughts.

At this moment, I feel really compressed, like a spring. I'm having a hard time working it all out in my head.

Here's what I wrote in the e-mail:
I wanted to thank you for holding a discussion about the party in class today. I really appreciated it when some of my professors last quarter dedicated some class time to talking about the tuition increase, especially because a lot of students were not aware of the context behind it all. I think as students, we tend to see ourselves living in an academic vacuum where outside events don't necessarily affect what's going on in the classroom. But that's not true because we are a part of a community on campus and the social affects the academic and vise versa.

I was actually surprised by some of the comments my peers made today about
the situation being blown out of proportion. Someone mentioned how there
have been other racially themed parties in the past that didn't get as
much negative attention so why should this one. But the problem with this
statement as I see it is that the people who are throwing these parties
come from a place of (usually white) privilege. They can have fun for a
few hours role playing another racial group but at the end of the night,
they have the ability to return to their safe, comfortable lives. If our
campus were predominately black, there's no way a party like this would
have happened. And that just shows the power discourse of the majority
believing that the minority is small enough to overcome and that it
doesn't have the strength to fight back. To say that this has happened and
will happen again in the future so there's no point in fighting it is only
to allow for such a cycle to continue.

So to answer the question you posed at the end of class: yes, I think it
is incredibly important to care about what's going on, because parties
like these could have been directed at any minority, which is dangerous
because hate speech and stereotype representation can lead to violence and
hate crimes. Vincent Chin is a clear example of this.
____________________________________________________

And this is what the Ethnic Studies department at my school wrote:
Ethnic Studies Faculty and Student Response to UCSD Campus Crisis Precipitated by the Event Dubbed the “Compton Cookout”