Sarah Fears — Class of 2017
I held many positions during my time at DePauw, but the position that was the most important to the administration was the unpaid emotional labor intern. For four years, my peers and I shouldered the burden to educate others on systemic oppression, misogyny, and White supremacy. We dealt with microaggressions daily. We stayed up late at night not only doing homework but developing solutions to make our campus safe. We woke up early for morning meetings with administrators to discuss our solutions only for the work to be siphoned off to another fruitless committee. I, personally, played into respectability politics and allowed myself to be weaponized against my peers who were deemed too aggressive, too unruly, too loud to sit at the decision table. I bought the lie of progress and actively participated in othering.
By my senior year, I was in tears every single day. I couldn’t make sustainable change from working within the institution. I thought of all the times our pain was exploited as we were asked over and over again to repeat our traumatic stories to trustees who would ask, “If there’s no numbers, how do we know assaults are happening?” We were asked to come to the table with key decision makers only to have a trustee say that “DePauw takes ghetto Blacks and turns them to good Blacks.”
I thought of the time in March 2015 when my friends and I were pulled over by a Putnam County police officer who never provided his name or took his hand off his gun. He saw three Black students and one White student in the car. He asked if we actually went to DePauw despite the four of us being in our university-issued track and field uniforms. He wanted identification from all of us — not just state IDs but our DePauw IDs. The officer asked the friend driving if he was often in trouble or been arrested because his name sounded familiar. The driver was an All-American discus thrower who was often in the paper for his achievements. The officer then proceeded to take out his flashlight at 4pm in the afternoon, reached over my body in the back seat, and asked the one White woman in the car if she felt safe with us.
I thought of the time my sib was tackled by police and deemed a threat during a counter protest. That same day a White woman threw coffee at protesters and was gently escorted away.
I wanted to give up every single day. I wanted to walk away and never look back. But what kept me here was AAAS. In my first year, I found my Big Sib through AAAS. She introduced me to other strong, amazing Black women and encouraged my involvement on campus. I was able to make friends and laugh in the kitchen during Thanksgiving or sit on the comfiest couch on Monday nights watching Teen Wolf. Through AAAS, I met my fiance. This organization is the foundation for so many Black students at DePauw. I stand in solidarity with the students brave enough to take action and demand the safety that other students take for granted.
