Last semester, the chant “We out here. We’ve been here. We ain’t leaving. We are loved,” reverberated around campus, as over 1,000 students took to the streets and filled Cross Campus in a massive “March of Resilience” to show solidarity against racial injustice. This semester, the chant will be heard once again, this time in the classroom.
On Friday, more than 50 students gathered in a seminar room in 81 Wall St. — lining the walls and sitting on the floor — to vie for one of the 18 spots in African American Studies professor Matthew Jacobson’s class, “Politics and Culture of the American ‘Color Line.’” In light of a series of racially charged events that occurred at Yale last fall, Jacobson has redesigned the syllabus for his class, organizing the readings into four sections, each corresponding to the elements of the student-activists’ chant. In particular, Jacobson’s syllabus cites the work done by Next Yale, a coalition of students advocating for racial justice on campus. Students said Jacobson’s decision validates many of the concerns surrounding racial injustice that they raised outside of an academic setting.