I resent the implication that this issue is solely about whether or not Chick-fil-A gets to stay on our campus. As a black student here at Elon I think that I understand, better than most, what it means to feel marginalized on this campus. I know what it means to have to defend your identity against bigotry. And I also know how it tastes to have to explain to your peers, your professors, your administration the many ways that your identity is constantly questioned and invalidated, particularly when instances of bias and discrimination occur. [quote]And that’s why it took me three days to work out a way to respond to the statement released by the Board of Trustees. It took me three days to figure out that the emotion that I was feeling was betrayal.[/quote]

Now listen, before you call me dramatic or insist that I’ve overreacted I want you to ask yourself how many times you’ve stood in a room of your peers and watched your friend relive the psychological trauma of conversion therapy, or the last time that you’ve seen someone out themselves to a room full of strangers. I’m also going to ask you to think of how many friends you’ve lost, not because they walked away from you, but because you’ve had to walk away from them after realizing how vehemently opposed they are to certain aspects of who you are.

No, the issue here is not entirely about Chick-fil-A. [quote]However, the Chick-fil-A debate is illustrative of what happens when a minority group tries to assert itself in ways that “interfere” with everyday lives of the larger population. “Keep your diversity, your difference, your change over there”, is the message that was sent to the LGBTQIA community along with the vendor policy committee’s decision.[/quote]  It was the message sent by the administration’s completely inability to act boldly and publicly over the “Coon” sign that was left on a student’s apartment door, and the message that certain members of our community feel every single time that a discrimination or bias incident that has occurred at Elon in the last few years. If nothing else these incidents have shown us there are larger inequalities in the institutional and socio-cultural frameworks here at Elon that need to be addressed. There is work that needs to be done with students that identify as a part of a minority community and as a member of the majority in order to address these problems. We need to figure out how to train our faculty and staff to identify and respond to these types of events. The unfortunate truth is that the debate over Chick-fil-A exploded the way that it did because it served as the vehicle through which one of our minority groups tried to address these institutional deficiencies. And that is why it is so important that we continue to discuss the presence of Chick-fil-A on our campus; this argument is not over nor should it be. We will continue to have crimes of bias and discrimination reported until we begin to take serious steps towards fixing the way that we view and discuss hate crimes.

So no, the issue is not just about Chick-fil-A. It’s much bigger than that, and it won’t go away until we start acting like it.