PHOTO COURTESY Saphire Ruiz ’19
A little over a year ago, it was announced in an email to the Posse community that Boston Posse was being discontinued. When that announcement was made, my Posse members and I — who make up what is now the last Boston Posse — were in the middle of our 8-month pre-collegiate training back in Boston and were informed of the decision over email by the director of Boston Posse.
When we were told that we would be the last Posse recruited from Boston, there was initially a sense of betrayal and frustration — we didn’t understand why it was happening and the folks in the Boston Posse office didn’t have answers for us. We talked about it for a bit with our Posse trainers, and then the conversation was essentially dropped, simply because we had no idea how the campus worked or how we could even respond. Regardless, the decision was made, and even though we didn’t yet know how to respond, there was an understanding that our time with Posse and at Hamilton was to be defined by the termination of Boston Posse.
On the last day of our training, we spent the day doing different activities around Boston. On this day, rising first-year Posse members write a letter to the incoming Posse. Our trainers forgot to take the letter-making activity out of our packet. At the time, my Posse members and I found it funny; nearly a year later, it’s a reminder of a tradition that has been taken away from us.
This past February, I wrote an op-ed in The Spectator following the Posse Plus Retreat, in which I laid out my frustrations about the decision to end Boston Posse. Hamilton’s Vice President of Enrollment Monica Inzer and Dean of Students Terry Martinez immediately reached out to me to talk about the grievances of the Posse community, in particular my Posse. Since then, there have been multiple meetings on the issue with different individuals; Boston Posse was even a topic at the most recent Town Hall.
When these meetings first began, there was some hope: although we as Posse Scholars knew and understood that the College would not give us the transparent answers that we were looking for (Hamilton, like most colleges and universities, is negligent when it comes to transparency,) we hoped that we would at the very least be able to have productive conversations and, in the end, get an official public statement from the College explaining why Boston Posse ended and how the College planned to continue to support Posse Scholars and students from marginalized backgrounds as a whole. We hoped for some accountability on behalf of the administration.
We have yet to get that accountability. We have, in essence, been pushed aside and ignored. We have had meeting after meeting, led the discussion at the Town Hall, and Posse Scholars have dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy and labor to this cause. And yet, we have nothing to show for it.
We are not being listened to. We have given specific and clear reasons as to why we are frustrated and angry and yet we still have administrators asking us why we are frustrated and angry. We have told administrators over and over again that releasing a written public statement will help to alleviate that frustration and anger and instead we are told — by someone who does not understand what it means to be a Posse Scholar, especially at this precarious time — that a public statement will not make us “less angry.”
When I asked College President David Wippman at the Town Hall why a public statement had yet to be released he responded that the College does not typically release public statements about “changes to [the] admission program” and continued to say he “just made a public statement [that] was being live-streamed.”
What people like President Wippman, Dean Martinez, and Vice President Inzer fail to understand is that the termination of Boston Posse is not like any other change to the admission process: the termination of Boston Posse is going to deeply affect culture on this campus and drastically change the community. It is going to deeply affect the personal lives of students on this campus. This is not simply a matter of diversity statistics, recruiting students from all over the nation, or a simple reallocation of resources — this is a matter of actual people’s lives.
Like many Posse Scholars, I am a multi-marginalized person, which means existing on this campus is unbelievably difficult. I am not even done with my freshman year and I have already been called racial slurs, have had to drop a class because of the racist biases of my professor and classmates, and have been gaslit and ignored by my peers and faculty and staff on this campus.
My experiences are those that many Posse Scholars — in addition to other marginalized people on this campus — experience and are representative of only a small portion of what we go through. Every day we perform emotional labor, we are worn down by the oppression we face, and we are largely left without institutional and administrative support. For a lot of us, the Posse community is where the support exists and where we turn to feel validated, visible, and sane. This is what the administration is taking away from us. And we can’t even get a written public statement explaining why or that it’s even happening in the first place.
Hamilton was my top choice when I was deciding where I wanted to go to college. Today, I honestly don’t know if I would continue my education at Hamilton if it was not for the Posse community — and I am not the only one who feels this way.
The Posse community offers something to this campus that the College cannot replicate or replace. Our voices, our actions, our work: it all has significant value on this campus. I will repeat what I wrote in my original op-ed: Posse Scholars are Resident Advisors, community organizers, club leaders, student government representatives, and more. We put all of our energy and spirit into everything we do on this campus and for this college, and we can’t even get a written public statement. Instead we’re told we’re being too emotional, we’re too angry, we’re too aggressive, a public statement won’t change anything, et cetera.
And as if we don’t have a right to be emotional, as if anyone other than ourselves can tell us what will make us “less angry,” as if our lives — how we navigate spaces on this campus, whether we feel safe and included on this campus, our mental health — haven’t been put at risk.
As if we do not have a right to demand that our existence is respected.
We are students on this campus because we belong on this campus. And it is the administration’s responsibility to ensure that they are hearing and taking our concerns seriously. President Wippman and the rest of the administration talk about “diversity” and use buzzwords to make it seem as though they care, but they ignore and belittle us when we tell them their diversity means nothing when we struggle on this campus everyday to even be treated as humans, or when in the same breath they praise diversity while cutting our community in half, or when the President himself can’t even speak to us at a Town Hall without making snarky remarks. When we tell them that their words mean nothing, when their actions go against everything they say they’re doing, their only response is to rebut, to call us angry, and to claim that we are “attacking” them.
How are we supposed to believe that the administration cares about us when it makes decisions that only harm us and then refuse to hold themselves accountable for being responsible for that harm? How are the incoming and future Miami Posse Scholars supposed to feel welcomed on this campus when there is no kind of support from the administration, and the support they would’ve found in the Posse community will be weakened as Boston Posse slowly disappears from this campus?
How are we supposed to thrive and be successful on this campus when everyday we must fight to simply exist and be heard?
