The photograph on the college website shows a confident, happy, young African-American woman using a bullhorn to address more than a hundred overwhelmingly white students holding protest signs. It was taken at a Black Lives Matter protest at Reed College, my alma mater, in September 2016. It was a beautiful day in Portland, Oregon, and the students were parading through campus, accompanied by drums and anything else that could make a sound. One of the cardboard signs in the crowd behind her said: ‘Brown People for Black Power.’ Another said: ‘1 out of 2 black students at Reed do not graduate.’

The demonstration marked the beginning of a year-long series of confrontations that turned the historically leftist college inside out. The young woman in the photo was responsible for organising most of them. I’ll call her Amanda, not her real name, because I don’t want her to be hounded by right-wing trolls. At most schools, demonstrations tend to flare up once or twice a year during a visit from a controversial right-wing speaker. At Reed, Amanda managed to create protests that occurred three days a week for most of the academic year. Before Amanda, the Black Lives Matter movement hadn’t gained much traction at Reed. Although its students have been ranked as the most liberal in the Princeton Review’s survey of the top 382 liberal-arts colleges, only about three per cent of the student population is black. The school has had a hard time attracting them, in spite of a ‘fly-in’ programme that distributes free airline tickets to prospective black students. But in September 2016, on the heels of a national debate on race, the school got behind the movement, letting demonstrators set up an afternoon rally in the quad and allowing sympathetic professors to cancel classes, hold extra sessions and adjust assignment deadlines.

At the end of the day, Amanda and 40 other students crowded into the office of President John Kroger and presented him with 25 demands. President Kroger praised them for their ‘tireless work on the critically important issues they have raised’, and sat down on the floor with them, a cup of coffee at hand, as he took notes on a legal pad. The following day, he led a five-hour meeting with students, faculty and administrators to discuss the demands and later detailed his progress in two monthly updates: The college would make efforts to hire more diverse faculty, health counsellors, tutors and mentors, and he announced a new summer internship programme for marginalised students. The college would move up the decennial review of its humanities programme, Hum 110, which protesters claimed was Eurocentric and racist. Henceforth, Amanda and other students who had been placed on academic probation would be allowed to hold elective student office. (The school apologised for being unable to find an appropriate synonym for ‘probation’, which some students found pejorative.) The college even published a blog post with a photograph of Amanda and her bullhorn, entitled ‘Protest Amplifies Discussion of Race on Campus’. A few months later, I received a letter from two Reed students of colour that was being distributed among alumni like a piece of samizdat. The students didn’t reveal their names for fear of being ostracised, but they described a campus that had been overtaken by militants who routinely shamed as racists anyone who didn’t agree with them. One of those singled out had been a freshman named Hunter Dillman who had been branded a racist after asking the organiser of a Latina student group an innocent question. He was ultimately hounded off campus.

The students said the Facebook shaming became even more virulent as the year went on. When another white student apologised to Amanda for being unable to attend a particular protest because he was behind on his schoolwork, Amanda accused him of being the kind of white guy who would ‘laugh at a lynching’. The students felt Amanda’s charge was so outrageous that they decided to take a big step: they would all ‘like’ the student’s apology on Facebook, even though they might be called racists as well. ‘As students of colour we felt that we had to do it’, one of them later told me. ‘It would have been 100 times worse if somebody white liked it.’ I wrote an article about the confrontations at Reed for The Economist that described the three-day-a-week protests against the humanities curriculum, and the shaming of Lucia Martinez Valdivia, a mixed-race Reed English professor, and Kimberly Peirce, the gender-fluid director of the film Boys Don’t Cry, whose talk was protested on campus. In the course of my reporting, I got to know two students: Amanda, the organiser of the protests, and Dillman, a chemistry major from rural Oregon.

Amanda In our first phone interview, Amanda told me she came from an economically mobile black family that was able to move to Santa Clarita, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. She described the place as very conservative. At one point in her junior year, her friend’s boyfriend threw a noose on her lawn as a sick joke. Her high school’s website displayed photos of an expansive upscale suburban campus with lacrosse fields and cheerleaders but very few black faces. She told me that her career as a social-justice leader started early in her sophomore year at Reed, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘In one week in September, three black men and one black boy were killed by police and nobody else was thinking about it’, she said. ‘That was surreal to me.’ She felt Reed didn’t do enough to address the grief it had caused and needed to declare a day off.

Reed was ‘a toxic environment where black people were underrepresented, undervalued and under-protected’, she said. The school accepted students of colour but failed to support them and didn’t show them that their minds were respected. Minority students who came to Reed for a progressive environment were offered a Eurocentric education that did not ‘reflect the lived experiences of people of colour’. Even worse, they were required to take Hum 110, which ‘participates in the narrative of white supremacy’. The entire curriculum needed to ‘trust and centre my low-SES [low-socioeconomic status], darker-skinned and trans friends’. Her chemistry professor, for example, taught to a traditional textbook, but only discussed research published by people of colour, women or those who ‘have maximum intersectional privilege’. A year of organising had left her feeling burnt out and eager to take a year off. She was making plans to set up a reading group at a nearby prison and help those coming out get accepted by educational institutions.

At the end of our conversation, I wondered if Amanda had simply landed at the wrong school. She told me that when her parents took her to tour campuses in the Northwest, she fell in love with Lewis and Clark. It was her first choice but she wasn’t accepted. She didn’t even visit Reed, although it was only a few minutes away. In the Princeton Review rankings, Reed students came in second in those who go on to get PhDs, and they are often academic to a fault. Lewis and Clark has a more outdoorsy and athletic vibe. Amanda would have been able to create her own major or minor in gender or ethnic studies. She would have been able to satisfy her first semester humanities requirement by reading Frederick Douglass, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf. Her second semester, she could have taken courses in anything from the Big Bang theory to vampires.

Hunter I arrived in Portland on a hot Sunday afternoon on the day before classes started. I walked across one of the pedestrian bridges that spans the school’s 28-acre canyon and sat down at a picnic table in the quad. Students sat eating lunch on tables nearby, chatting excitedly about the new school year, a few of them barefoot. A stream of corgis and their owners strolled by on their way to the annual corgi parade. In the old student union, a dozen students were folk dancing to the same scratchy recordings I’d heard decades ago. I began to doubt what I’d heard about Reed. This couldn’t possibly be the nasty place described in the alumni letter.

Hunter Dillman agreed to meet me on campus before we went to lunch in a barbeque joint a few blocks away. He was 6’2″, drove a beat-up black pickup and had pale blue eyes and blond hair parted in the centre. He was eager to talk to somebody who wanted to hear his story in detail, somebody who didn’t believe he had simply fucked up his freshman year. He told me his father was a construction worker who owned a farm and raised cows and chickens on the side. Hunter had taken four advanced placement (AP) science courses his senior year, getting all fives, and planned to get a degree in chemistry. At the beginning of the first semester, as he was going to dinner with a friend, he read a Facebook post from the leader of a Latina group who wrote that her group planned to ‘Stop Trump’ and asked fellow students for support in a school funding survey. He was curious and considered getting involved. After he asked her a couple of times to be more specific about how the group planned to stop Trump, she accused him of being a racist for challenging a Latina student support group. He responded that if her group called people racist just for asking questions, he had no intention of voting to fund it.

A few minutes later, when the Latina activist happened to meet him waiting in line at the dining hall, she continued her accusations and called him a ‘little white boy’. Shaken, he took his food back to his room and tried to eat as he watched in horror as comment after comment about him appeared on Facebook, denouncing him as a bigot. The next day, as he was walking across campus, a student screamed ‘Racist!’ at him. The accusers never came up to talk to him, but the online abuse kept coming. Many of the people he thought were friends dropped him. And although a few said they sympathised, no one was willing to stand up for him. The fact that he was 25 per cent Native American only made things worse. ‘How dare you use your Native American identity to justify your racism?’, his Native American peer counsellor asked him.