"No Colored People" Sign Causes Stir at Wesleyan

(Wesleyan) University’s first official celebration of Holi took place Friday, April 27 on Foss Hill...Holi, known as the Festival of Colors, is a celebration of spring...“Holi is celebrated by people throwing colored powder at one another,” said Katherine Yagle ’12, a member of Shakti who helped organize Friday’s event. “[During the festival] in India everyone is intoxicated. There is a lot of dancing, music, and general chaos. People use water balloons and water guns to douse each other with color.”

Last Friday, during the HOLI festival on Foss Hill, several members of Shakti, one of the groups that organized the event, put up signs on the doors of Usdan University Center (Usdan) that prompted broad student criticism and discussion. The posters were intended to prevent festival attendees from entering Usdan while coated in the colored powder that is flung during the event.

(Wesleyan's) President Michael Roth, in an all-campus email, commented on the objectionable content of the Shakti signs.

“Wesleyan’s campus is a place of great multi-cultural learning and festivity,” wrote Roth. “The Holi event is a wonderful example of this. The campus can also be a place of vulnerability and misperception, and the signs posted on Friday for many evoked patterns of injustice and violence that our society has not yet left behind.”

Roth wrote that the incident would be recorded in the Campus Climate Log, and that he had requested that the Student Affairs offices and the Office of Diversity and Institutional Partnerships help in the wake of the posting of the signs."

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