By Michelle Fuentes

Our community can no longer allow acts of verbal and written racial violence.  We are failing our mission, our creed and our commitment to producing leaders that will help our state and nation flourish in the future.

We can no longer sustain our commitment to being a community, a family united under the banner of The University of Alabama, while members of our community are degraded and hurt. Further, a campus-wide email is no longer an acceptable response.

Administration and faculty, we, the students of The University of Alabama, are bright, kind and teachable. We demonstrate our collective excellence in academic, athletic and extracurricular pursuits on a regular basis. We are coachable.

It is no longer acceptable to only present a curriculum and student life development activities that are only non-racist. We, as a community, must adopt a lifestyle, infused into all facets of life at the University, that is proactively anti-racist.

Administration, faculty, coaches, advisors and mentors, you must teach each one of us why racial slurs, name calling and insults are harmful. We have used them too often. From freshman orientation to graduation, our experience at the Capstone must now be injected with a spirit that sees beauty and strength in difference.

We need you to teach us. We need to be shown radical institutional change to make our campus and our community safe and welcoming for all members. We are calling out for your guidance.

If we can learn organic chemistry, translate French, Spanish and Arabic, sketch artistic masterpieces, win national athletic championships, solve advanced logic puzzles and write award winning research projects, we can do this too.  But, we need you to show the way, everyday and in everything we do together.

Michelle Fuentes is a doctoral student in political science.