I didn’t have an especially wild college experience, at least by conventional standards. I wasn’t in a fraternity, didn’t do drugs, and didn’t party much. Animal House it was not.

The most memorable thing to happen in my four years of college was probably the whole-of-campus meltdown that ensued after a few girls hosted an impolitic Halloween party. They called it a “ghetto” party, which they should have known was a terrible idea; some of the attendees posted pictures of themselves in orange prison jumpsuits and cornrowed hair.

Within days, there were write-ups of the incident in the New York Times and Teen Vogue. Black student groups on campus were up in arms, and denounced the school and their fellow students as racist in a school-wide “conversation” on race relations. They insisted that the incident was representative of subtler forms of racism that supposedly pervaded the school.