Today I had to write about Brown

To this day, my graduation week at Brown with my family still stands out as one of the happiest weeks of my life. At Campus Dance, my entire family danced together on the Main Green for what felt like hours without stopping, twisting our hips down until we touched the grass, dancing until the band played its final song. We joked in that moment that as immigrants, the family had finally “made it.” Like everything would be uphill from here. 

I have been thinking all weekend about the idea of “safety” — when I’ve actually had it, the years I spent normalizing not having it, the moments it still feels impossible to have it fully. What does safety mean living in a country statistically guaranteed to violate you? And what does it mean when you still sometimes feel some semblance of genuine safety even within that country, even within its institutions that were not built to care for you? 

What I know is that at eighteen years old, Brown felt safer than anywhere else I had ever experienced. It welcomed parts of me that, at that age, had never felt welcomed before. And it gave me a sense of possibility I so desperately needed as a first generation kid. It’s the first place I saw snow, the first place I learned about “backpacking,” the first place I fell in love. Taking Ralph Rodriguez’s Latino Literature class is probably the reason I’m now a writer. Taking FemSex sophomore year is probably the reason I (ten years later) realized I’m pretty gay. Brown is where I allowed myself to believe my life could be different than what my ancestors had. It was the foundation that let me later imagine and invent and advocate for that life, every year after.  

Of course, so much has changed since then, and I know now so much that back then I couldn’t know. I keep asking myself: if I felt so safe and happy during that time because I was young and in many ways didn’t know anything better, does that make the sense of safety I felt any less real? Do students today even have that luxury, to enter a university naively, assuming a certain level of safety from harm? 

Whatever semblance of safety these students too might have briefly had at Brown, I am so heartbroken it was violated this weekend. It feels so enraging. It feels so personal. By now, I thought I had become (monstrously) numb to news of mass shootings, but the moment I heard of this one, I couldn’t stop crying. The grief and protectiveness I feel towards this place is also the protectiveness I feel towards my younger self, this lonely teenage version of me who so needed a space like Brown to hold her. How dare they attack that space. How dare they make it even harder for young people to feel like they can truly have any sense of refuge anywhere, to have any moment of rest.

Today I watched the video of a Brown student who had survived this shooting. Six years ago, she was shot in the stomach at a shooting at her high school, and her best friend was killed. And I just keep thinking about the conference where I sat with a group of DEI professionals I had respected — all my generation and above— and they spent a whole session complaining about the younger generation, how unwilling they are to compromise, how impatient they are about social change. It infuriated me then, and it infuriates me even more after this weekend, when we again witnessed what a radically different reality young people today live. They don’t compromise because the violence of their lives has been uncompromising. Their pace of demanding change is the pace at which the world is actually moving. How disrespectful to their grief that we doubt them.

I don’t believe in the American Dream anymore, or “making it” in the traditional sense I believed in at graduation, and I no longer necessarily even believe in what Brown stands for as an institution. And still, what Brown meant for me as a young person, the safety I felt there during that time: god, it was so meaningful, and in so many ways, it changed my entire life. 

I am grieving so much that these students have lost access to that kind of safety, that they live in a world where they may have never felt it to begin with.