After a series of racist incidents at Syracuse University, first-year Tahliyah Tabron called her parents. They told her they wanted her to leave campus.
“My mother was like, ‘Ok, you have to get out of there,’” Tabron said.
Tabron bought a train ticket to go home to north New Jersey the next day, over a week before her Thanksgiving break started.
It wasn’t “financially convenient” but her parents thought it was necessary, she said. She wasn’t worried for her safety at the time, but she ultimately thought they were right. As a student of color, “anything could have happened.”
At Syracuse University, at least 12 racist and anti-Semitic incidents happened on campus in the last month, all within a two-week period, alarming students, parents, alumni and staff. A swastika drawn in a snowbank, graffiti targeting Black, Asian, Native American and Jewish students and an email to a Jewish faculty member – Writing Rhetoric and Composition Professor Dr. Genevieve García de Müeller – telling her: “Get in the oven where you belong.” The list goes on.
As students return to campus this week to prepare for finals, they continue to feel “tense.”
“I’m just still in shock,” Tabron said. “I haven’t really fully processed everything that went down in the last two weeks, because everything sort of happened so fast and all at the same time.”
