In response to concerns about the preparedness of incoming students during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the college implemented academic advising for first-year students during the summer....

Dear President Murray, We were extremely disheartened by your recent email response to the political intervention upon the Marcus Whitman statue, which took place on Indigenous Peoples’ Day. You admonished...

The Marcus Whitman statue is at it again, sparking activism that compels us to confront Whitman College and white settlement as one and the same. This time, the statue’s defacement involved rephrasing...

It has been almost five months since the portrait of Narcissa Whitman that once hung in Prentiss Hall was defaced with black spray paint, and Avard Fairbanks’ statue of Marcus Whitman on the corner of...

The Global Studies Initiative has diversified the curriculum and co-curriculum, helped recruit and retain minority faculty members, and is organized by a committee composed of a disproportionate number of women faculty of color; i.e., it does good “diversity work.”

I’ve often heard it said that people at Whitman don’t talk about race. It is quite true that an impoverished lexicon for discussions of race and racism exists at our institution, but this is not unique to Whitman—it is a generalized problem typifying political discourse in the United States, in which "race" surfaces to diagnose affective extremity (e.g., racial hatred), suspicious mobilizations of history (e.g., race-baiting) or demographic minoritization (e.g. “the Hispanic vote”). No wonder, then, that even faculty struggle to conceptually separate "race" (the historically contingent, political phenomenon through which categorical differences are ascribed to bodies) from "racism" (the creation or reproduction of structures of domination based on essentialized racial categories).