Type Away Cait

photo credit: Joseph Cumbo / The Buffalo State Record It’s been a little over a week since SUNY Buffalo State College was ordered to shelter-in-place after there was a nearby shooting outside of McKinley High School. Everything appears to be back to normal: students with their backpacks, the usual sound of the blender at Starbucks in Academic Commons and students rushing to their classes. The suspects may have been identified and it may feel like a lot of time has passed since then, but we mustn’t forget what we’ve learned from this experience. The Record had a chance to interview students on their experience and their thoughts on how the overall campus community was prepared. Katie Egan, a sophomore, was in her dorm in Tower One when she read the Buffalo State email alert and described that many students were acting as if nothing had happened. “I could see out the window that people had left our building. I was like, ‘Why are you leaving the building?’” she said. “I even went down to...

The screening of "The Neutral Ground: A Story About Sore Losers," which took place last Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Burchfield Penney Art Center as part of the  Beyond Boundaries: Dare to Be Diverse Screening and Discussion Series , was followed by a discussion panel with Chief of Staff to President Katherine Conway-Turner and State University of New York College at Buffalo Chief Diversity Officer Crystal Rodriguez-Dabney; John Torrey, a professor who holds a doctorate in philosophy and Mikaila Morgan, an Africana studies major. Directed by CJ Hunt, a field producer for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, this first movie to launch the spring semester chronicles New Orleans’ fight over Confederate monuments and “America’s troubled romance with the Lost Cause.” “When we talk about racism and all these deeply embedded prejudices, they’re institutionalized, and when we talk about the way they’re in our institutions, it’s not just the statues,” said Ruth Goldman, an associate professo...

One of the GOP’s main focuses lately has been on education. They’re on the hunt to ban books in an attempt to put a stop to critical race theory despite the fact there is little to no evidence that it’s taught in K-12 schools. In Tennessee, a school board banned “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin photo credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber Most recently, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin had an email hotline set up specifically for parents to address their concerns of what he called, “divisive concepts ,” including critical race theory. Democrats argue that this is an attack on education and that they are attempting to erase history. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis showed his support for the Parents Rights In Education , also known as the Don’t Say Gay Bill, which essentially prohibits “a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels.” Florida Go...

Josiah Henson, photographed in Boston, 1876 Saladin Allah , the third-great grandson of the Underground Railroad freedom seeker whom Harriet Beecher Stowe used as the primary narrative for her famous 19th century novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ” joined “Conversations With Cait,” where he shared his ancestor’s history. A bestselling novel, Stowe received a lot of criticism from the public as it was one of the first books that addressed the horrors of slavery. In fact, what most people don’t know, according to Allah, is that she wrote a second book called, “A Key To Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which lists all of the references that she used, and it is in this book where she mentions Josiah Henson’s name. “He was a forerunner for the Underground Railroad, which essentially means when he made his journey from the South to the North. Harriet Tubman, her name was Araminta at the time, she was still a child on a plantation,” Allah said. “He left the south of Kentucky in about 1830 and he made that jour...