Afterword

• Author: Rebecca Ann Taylor
• Profession: Writer and attorney
• Pages: 285-286

285

Long before the world had ever heard of how Dharun Ravi had used a

webcam to livestream Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounter with another man,

traumatizing Tyler so much that he committed suicide, I, too, was a stu-

dent at Rutgers University. My experience of Rutgers was incredible overall.

The vibrant and diverse student body celebrated the richness of differences

among us for the most part. Students hailed from almost every country

across the globe and there were (and still are to this day) campus organiza-

tions where all of these ethnicities and cultures could connect.

But homophobia was present then and still exists in modern times, as

the Dharun Ravi case illustrates. When I attended Rutgers we all had e-mail

and were able to chat on the university network, but the Internet was just

in its nascent stages (we had access to the early Netscape). We were a long

way from webcams, digital cameras, Facebook, Twitter, and all of the new

communications tools that emerged within the last decade. These new tools

escalated Ravi’s hate crimes to catastrophic levels, where Clementi was

humiliated before unseen thousands, possibly millions, and this trauma

led him to take his life. I followed the Ravi case and verdict from afar, but

in the jury’s decision to nd him guilty of hate crimes, not infantile boyish

pranks, I heard echoes of the Rutgers community and their erce sense of

justice that I knew so well.

Rutgers was also where I encountered street activism for the rst time,

rather than just reading about it in history books. Here, people not only

spoke out about what they believed in, but they did something about it,

too. In the spring of my freshman year, I took part in a march to protest

the lack of student inclusion in university decisions.

The following year, students demonstrated again with a new rage. Rutgers

President Francis Lawrence had stated in a speech that “black students do

not have the ‘genetic hereditary background’ to do well on standardized tests

Afterword

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