Last Friday, students demanding more visible “safe spaces” for transgender people and people of color at UC Berkeley formed a wall across Sather Gate, preventing white students from crossing campus.
This protest, which continued over the weekend, meant to raise awareness of the lack of “safe spaces” available to LGBTQ and transgender people. A “safe space” already exists in the basement of Eshleman Hall but protesters demand a more visible location.
Responding to calls of “Who’s university?” students exclaimed “Our university” as they formed a chain across the gate preventing white students from breaching the barrier.
White students and teachers who attempted to pass through were turned back and forced to cross the Strawberry Creek under the bridge. Nonwhite students were allowed to pass by without qualm.
Later, the group of protesters marched first to the Student Union and then to the university store. There, they pasted an “eviction notice” which reads, “University administration wrongly allocated this two-story facility to a third-party corporation, keeping in line with its intensifying legacy of prioritizing financial profit over student needs.”
Students warned, “The work that these student-run spaces produce to recruit and retain students of color and provide support for the LGBTQIIA+ student community is invaluable and must be affirmed by the university.”
In a piece for Huffpost Living, Aeman Ansari argues that safe spaces belong on college campuses. She says, “Marginalized groups have a right to claim spaces in the public realm where they can share stories about the discrimination they have faced without judgment and intrusion from anyone else.”
However, the Independent Journal Review says, “Given the footage, it’s not hard to see how some are arguing that — in their attempts to demand equality — these students were only creating division.”
ASUC President Will Morrow argues that the protest is necessary to raise awareness of the issue. He told the Daily Californian, “Students doing important work like these two organizations do … are vital to our campus community and therefore the space they … are in should feel like a central part of the community.”
David Lemus, organizing and community development director, agrees. “Right now, no one knows where our centers are. This is part of the structural racism of UC Berkeley — no one can find the group,” he said via the Daily Californian. “It has turned the program practically … invisible for students.”
