Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton sent out a campus-wide email on August 26 stating that, in response to various “tragic events” since the school year ended, the “pursuit of social justice must continue.”
Among the tragedies noted were the Orlando nightclub massacre, the murder of five Dallas police officers, and the killings of “Philando Castile in Minnesota and Cameron Sterling in Louisiana.”
Oops. It was Alton Sterling who was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana back on July 5. Cameron Sterling is Alton’s son.
Two and a half hours later in a follow-up email, Wrighton corrected himself and apologized. But many in the WU community remained unsatisfied.
“It was funny, because when I opened it, I was thinking, ‘hmm, when’s the chancellor going to do his typical pandering diversity spiel thing?’ so I scrolled down and I was reading and I saw ‘Cameron Sterling,’ and so I quickly googled Cameron Sterling and found out that he was Alton Sterling’s son, and so I was like, okay, that’s pretty suspicious, he clearly just wasn’t following it at all,” [Senior Chelsea] Birchmier said. …
Birchmier spoke with several friends about the problem before posting, and noted that one friend pointed out that the language of the email did not come across as an apology—instead it seemed that he was making excuses and explanations.
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“It was sort of like his apology wasn’t actually an apology, but beyond that, even if he had apologized, it’s not really enough just to send an email because it’s symptomatic of a much larger problem of the University not caring about black lives basically, or acting like they do, putting on events like Day of Diversity and Dialogue but continuously implementing policies that are detrimental to black people, so working to actually change those,” Birchmier said.
2016 graduate Anagha Narayanan sent Wrighton an email to inform him of his error—she said that she told him that the error was proof of “a lack of empathy” rather than carelessness. …
She also said that the problem was a greater issue than mere email typos.
“Maybe if his administration wasn’t so white, these kinds of things wouldn’t happen so often,” [she] said.
Student Christian Ralph agreed “It’s not about [Wrighton’s] apology” and pointed to past incidents of racial insensitivity at Washington as a “systemic issue.”
He said that as a remedy, the university would have to take “concrete steps” toward accepting the Black Lives Matter movement: “You can’t be in the middle, there is no middle ground: you have to be for the right, for the side of human dignity in a more than just a cavalier or cliché way.”
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