Senior Profile | Joelle Crichlow
Leading the Charge to Make Change With Care Guided by a passion for changemaking and a commitment to making Amherst a better place, Joelle Crichlow has done just that — and she will continue to effect positive change wherever her path takes her. — Sonia Chajet Wides ’25 Joelle Crichlow ’22 is the definition of a doer. “People come up to me all the time and say ‘You’re friends with Joelle, right? How does she do everything?’” said her friend Sonja Lazovic ’22. I wondered the same thing when I first arrived at Amherst; Crichlow was the Peer Advocate (PA) who led my orientation workshop on sexual respect, and when I began writing for The Student, I read past articles and found that her name appeared everywhere. She was president of the Black Students Union (BSU), she is on the student anti-racism task force, she is a Student Equity & Inclusion Liaison, she was leading initiatives like #IntegrateAmherst. She is a model of community engagement, a hard worker who makes it look effortless. Over the course of my twohour conversation with her, sitting in the late-afternoon sun at a picnic table outside Morris Pratt Dormitory, it was clear to me that Crichlow’s engagement comes from a deep care for the people around her, an understanding of the meaning of community, and serious thought about how to make change. This passion has led her to incredible academic and extracurricular heights, and defines her role on campus. Her friends agreed: “She gets things done because she cares a lot,” Lazovic said. “Her growth in leadership is just a natural development.” President Biddy Martin, who has worked with Crichlow on the
Anti-Racism Advisory Group, agreed: “I have been impressed by Joelle’s clarity of thought and purpose, her incisive contributions to discussion, and her strength of conviction and purpose,” Martin said, “Joelle is a talented thinker and leader … she combines these qualities with warmth and humor.”
Expanded Community Crichlow first learned about Access to Amherst (A2A ) weekend — an all-expenses-paid fly-in visit for students of color and low-income students — then called the Diversity Open House (DIVOH), while doing college research as a high school junior. Attending A2A helped Crichlow decide to apply early to Amherst. “I felt like diversity was something that I was lacking in my high school,” she said. “And so going to DIVOH, I felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a school that really cares about diversity.’” Crichlow grew up in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, an “overwhelmingly” white, affluent community. She attended the same school from elementary school through high school. While her surroundings were largely homogenous, her parents “always placed an importance on being in the Black community,” and Crichlow and her brother “had a Black network outside of high school” through the organization Jack and Jill and their family’s social circle. This network “supplemented the fact that there weren’t that many
18 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022
of us [at my high school],” Crichlow said. “It was like, ‘Alright, this is just what this is. And I have somewhere else I can go.’” While this connection to the community was helpful, Crichlow discussed the difference between her experience and the experience of “growing up wholly enmeshed in and around a Black community.” This was one of the reasons that she was interested in coming to Amherst, and knew that she would also major in Black studies. “This was something that I felt like I hadn’t gotten exposure to in high school,” she said, “Everything was very whitewashed. I wanted to be involved in that community more, and I wanted to do it in an academic lens as well.” Once she arrived, Crichlow became situated in Amherst’s Black community: “God, it was so great,” she said. “I think I came into my own.” On the experience of being a Black woman at Amherst, Crichlow said, “To be clear, it has not been perfect,” but she added that the community made it so “I didn’t feel like I was censoring parts of my identity … it just was a place where I could actually just have fun and be myself wholly for the first time. Which also made learning more fun.”
Commitment to Change Crichlow is someone who is deeply involved at Amherst, guided by a passion for changemaking and a commitment to making Amherst a better place.
Photo courtesy of Joelle Crichlow ’22
President of the BSU, a member of the anti-racism task force, and a Student Equity & Inclusion Liaison, Crichlow has been involved in many social justice initiatives at Amherst, effecting much change along the way. She pinpointed her sophomore year as the time where her “activism at the college picked up, at least in relation to race matters.” At the time, she was serving as the vice president of the BSU, and Amherst had just been rocked by a racist incident involving white members of the men’s lacrosse team verbally assaulting a Black player. The BSU leapt into action, forming the #IntegrateAmherst movement, which included a series of demands to the college via a letter signed by over 2,000 students from across the nation in 48 hours. “That was kind of an interesting position for me to be in,” Crichlow recalled. “It sounds horrible to say that I’ve been lucky in horrible instances of racism, but I was in leadership positions to affect tangible change at those moments. So I was very much able to be involved.” In August of the same year, Martin was forming a Student Anti-Racism Task Force and reached
out to Crichlow to ask for member recommendations. Crichlow herself ended up serving on the committee, which continues to meet with Martin weekly. At the time that she got involved in the task force, Crichlow described going through a change in outlook about how to effect change at the college. After taking Lembo’s classes and dealing with the lacrosse incident, “I honestly was feeling very cynical,” Crichlow recalled. “I was like, ‘Burn the institution! Everything sucks! It’s never gonna be better, screw the school, screw everyone!’” But during the pandemic, facing the possibility of being overwhelmed by interrupted learning, mass death, and political unrest, she found herself looking for “positives” as she saw people come together. During this time, she began to think about changemaking from a more pragmatic standpoint. “This was around the place where I would say I got a lit-
