Crossfire: Power and Privilege attendance
February 23, 2023
The Problem with Power and Privilege – Bex Heimbrock
The Power and Privilege Symposium (P&P) started, like most co-opted neoliberal phenomena, as a protest. Before P&P, in 2006, there was the student-organized symposium on race relations and community – created by the sheer force of student activism following a blackface-infested party at Sigma Chi.
The first symposium is largely remembered as a frank, honest conversation around issues of race at Whitman and beyond. Now, however, the symposium is shackled both by the paternalism of Whitman’s administration and burnt-out student leaders who – while well-intentioned – seem to prioritize buzzwords and agreeable content over difficult, sometimes painful discussions.
Take, for example, this year’s P&P keynote speaker, Loretta J. Ross. Ross is a principal partner with a consulting firm – 14th Strategies Consultants – that brands themselves as having “business and real life experience from the streets to the boardroom.”
While Ross is a truly exceptional activist and advocate whom I greatly admire, 14th Strategies Consultants is emblematic of the very issue with P&P – conflating corporations and administrations with social justice. 14th Strategies Consultants proudly declare on their website that they have worked with Fortune 500 companies.
Whitman College’s Power and Privilege Symposium is missing the point. The commodification of racial justice language, used to benefit big corporations, is antithetical to the very nature of this fight. Of the thirteen sessions held during this year’s symposium, only three explicitly mention race as a topic of discussion.
Certainly, it is much easier for Whitman’s 59.6 percent white and 66 percent upper-middle to upper-class (seriously, in 2017, 66 percent of Whitties were from the top 20 percent) to spend a day talking about what it means to be an accomplice than it is to have difficult discussions about race at Whitman and beyond.
What’s the point of mandatory attendance when the information that students will be forced to receive is nothing short of standardized, barely political, corporate jargon?
P&P Doesn’t Need to be Perfect, You Just Need to Show Up – Kaitlin Cho
The Power and Privilege Symposium at Whitman College has its roots in not merely understanding issues, but understanding each other. It’s one thing to discuss in the theoretical, to read an article or to watch a YouTube video; it’s another thing entirely to come into a room, listen and talk to members of your community.
Particularly in our post-COVID world, we often conduct or witness “discourse” on the Internet, or with strangers, which always carries some loss of reality. The conversation becomes impersonal. Ultimately, the many issues we talk about during the Power and Privilege Symposium – race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, war, healthcare and climate change – share one thing in common: they are human issues and are almost always discussed by the people affected by them. Almost as importantly, we are connected to those people: they are our peers, our faculty or our fellow residents. What the Power and Privilege Symposium offers us, more than anything else, is de-abstraction. These problems and these discussions become individual, personal and real.
Of course, all of this is only possible if people come. To be honest, I don’t even think people need to be “ready to engage.” I’ve found any initial reluctance fades quickly when the session begins. The trouble is that for many students, that initial reluctance is enough for them to simply not attend the Power and Privilege Symposium sessions – and it’s often the students most averse to going that would benefit the most from attending. It’s for this reason that I believe Whitman College should make P&P attendance mandatory.
It’s not that the Power and Privilege Symposium is perfect, but it doesn’t need to be – the point of the Power and Privilege Symposium is, after all, to have a dialogue. P&P offers us an opportunity to turn hashtags and Instagram infographics into something personal and community-oriented, leading to an intellectual and emotional understanding of these issues. The first step to taking advantage of this is showing up.
Anonymous • Mar 10, 2023 at 12:19 am
This article displays the myopic and toxic attitude that holds that activists who actually accomplish anything must have compromised their views and “sold out”.
Real people are suffering in the world but people like this columns writer would rather feel good about themselves than accidently be too “neoliberal” by working with the system as it actually exists. There’s not going to be a revolution. Zero percent chance that happens. And if it does happen, its not going to be the kind of revolution you (or I) like!
Anonymous • Mar 10, 2023 at 12:16 am
You can’t have a “difficult conversation about race” if you refuse to hear the “other side” talk. Sorry. Not how that works.
A real “honest conversation about race” involves allowing white people to share their honest, unfiltered feelings. If you bash them all into silence and submission through social pressure, they won’t show up and you won’t have an honest conversation.
Of course its not fair that in an “honest conversation about race” racism would get a platform along with antiracism. But guess what? The world isn’t fair. If you want to do any good in the world you have to accept that. Otherwise, keep engaging in feel-good nonsense like P&P. Keep writing articles every year about why the privileged groups don’t show up.
NOT Kathy from HR • Feb 23, 2023 at 4:49 pm
I have two things I want to say in response to Bex’s section, one short and one long.
1. Sure, Loretta J. Ross’s employer works for large corporations. However, I don’t think we can penalize her for…needing to work for survival? She has bills and bills require money, so she needs to work. However, she’s also an academic and activist who deeply cares about these issues–she’s not Kathy from HR who thinks DEI starts and ends at the article she read in the Wall Street Journal.
2. Every P&P session I’ve attended, both this year and the two years prior, featured students speaking from personal experience and sharing their perspectives, research, or causes. I know the event is far from perfect, but I like to think of it as solidarity-building between us students. Obviously, it’s something that can be good publicity for the college and that can bring tuition dollars–I mean students–but dismissing it outright seems misguided. At least to me, there didn’t seem to be corporate language about “treating everyone equally” or “respecting differences” (that’s what I imagine when I think of corporate DEI, I’m sure there are better examples). Instead, I heard people thinking about radical changes that could happen to the school and community: fighting ableist requirements, transnational solidarity, and more.
I don’t mean to be bootlicking on Whitman’s perfect and almighty environment, but I think the effort’s there, and the corporatism isn’t.