“Race does not necessarily have to be smeared, it just needs to be less weighted,” said Mr Goodman, who is biracial, the child of an Indian mother and a white father. “And I think what needs to be put in place is weight and class and wealth and the access they allow.”
Kahlil Greene, a senior who last year was the first Black student to be elected president of Yale’s student body, said he considered his race “a part of my identity, not a plus or a minus.” To ignore it, he said, would be “strange.”
“It’s like taking a plot point or character out of a story, like an early omission,” he said.
He was hurt by belief expressed on social media the last day that “Black students have a much easier time getting in” to Yale because of their race. The finding of justice has inflated this resentment, he said.
As a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Cinthia Zavala Ramos, a Yale senior who was born in Honduras but whose family moved to the United States when she was 6, has four years with Trump. administration, she said, because the president threatened to end the program that would allow her to stay. The tension between the administration and the university feels familiar to them.
The experience for her white classmates seems very different, she said. Some have parents like grandparents who also attended university.
“For them, Yale was a ride of passage,” said Ms. Zavala Ramos. “There are always these feelings of, like, this setting was not meant for us, and there are people who have been here for generations who feel the same way they see us.”
Mary Chen, 20, a junior, said she had experienced discrimination against Asian Americans. She reminded herself that she was being bullied by classmates in the seventh grade at her birthplace, Columbus, Ga. But she did not believe Yale was discriminatory against Asian applicants, and yet, she said, the racism she experienced did not compare to anti-black racism in America.
