Opinion
Working with Whiteness group seeks to combat complacency in race-related issues
By Audrey Darnis ’18
February 23, 2017
Tags opinion
Working with Whiteness is a student-organized group that endeavors to “engage white students with intersectional anti-racism work in a way that works towards collective liberation for us all.” I found this quote off the “Working with Whiteness” Facebook page (which one can find by searching “Working with Whiteness Student Group”), and it clearly encapsulates the overarching goals of the group.
The group’s founding members include Kateri Boucher ’17, KT Glusac ’17, Isabel O’Malley ’18, Mo McDermott ’18, Jana Prudhomme ’19 and Gwyn Sise ’19. Additionally, they have the faculty guidance of professors Margo Okazawa-Rey and Ashley Bohrer of the women’s studies and philosophy departments, respectively. I spoke with most of these students during one of their lunch open hours, which occur every Tuesday at noon in McEwen and are open to the entire Hamilton community. Even at largely progressive institutions like Hamilton, complacency in issues of race often hinder attempts to combat the issue. With this in mind, I urge anyone interested in anti-racism work within our campus community to join this conversation and get involved. Working with Whiteness is a great place to start.
Boucher had the idea of founding this group after she spent a summer working in Detroit, where 80 percent of the city’s population is comprised of people of color. Through her experiences of working against racism and corruption in Detroit, Boucher asked herself how she could best encourage white people in her immediate community to participate in anti-racism efforts. She explained to me how many of the white students whom she knows at Hamilton are well- intentioned; they don’t want to be racist, but many of them are unsure about how to fight racism. Since racism is more than racial slurs or derogatory jargon and is a systemic issue embedded in our political and social institutions (an issue to which Hamilton is most certainly not immune), Boucher wanted a way to bring white students together as allies to be more active participants in the dismantling of racism in our community.
Once Boucher gathered some friends who were interested in these pursuits, they e-mailed Phyllis Breland, director of Opportunity Programs, to help orchestrate logistics and get the group started. Interested members on campus got connected through Facebook, and the group began meeting regularly this past semester, the fall of 2016, to plan the goals, ideas and events for the organization. They talked for hours, pondering questions such as who their target audience is and how to attract students to commit to attending these events and getting involved. After an entire semester of planning, the group started to have public events and discussions open to the Hamilton community, with a particular emphasis placed on drawing white students into these conversations.
Over our McEwen lunch, the group’s members stressed to me how the white individuals within this group do not see themselves as perfect, idyllic white allies. They seek to learn how to become better allies through discussions with each other as well as students of color, but are by no means trying to put themselves on some sort of “ally pedestal.” This group is not attempting to speak for black students or for students of color on our campus about their experiences; rather, the group speaks to how white people can be complicit in their racism either through ignorance of their privilege, unwillingness to stand up against micro-aggressions or problematic language and general complacency towards educating themselves about cultural differences.
Working with Whiteness places a strong emphasis on responsibility by holding white students accountable to communities of color on campus. The group ultimately aims to center the experiences of students of color at every step of the process because white students cannot do this work in isolation. They have fostered this accountability through personal relationships with students of color on campus as well as through connections with cultural organizations.
I think that white students are often very quick to defend themselves in how they are “not racist,” yet I find that these students are overwhelmingly complacent in actively fighting against racism. As Desmond Tutu’s famous quote reads: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Although many white Hamilton students may not be explicitly neutral and may identify themselves as allies to communities of color, how often do these students use their racial privilege in service of social change? How often do white Hamilton students participate in active anti-racism conversations? Do the majority of white students at Hamilton really understand and grasp their privilege? How can white students be more empathetic to the experiences of students with other racial identities? These are the kinds of questions that I feel can be critically and productively discussed through Working with Whiteness.
Another integral aspect of this group is its focus on explicit intersectional anti-racism work. Intersectionality is a theory that does not solely address one social category; it analyzes all of the various categories of identity such as race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, nationality, religion and more. In maintaining an intersectional analysis, the group aims to be as encompassing and inclusive as possible in understanding the wide variances and diversities of students of color’s experiences, as well as white students’ experiences.
The group hopes to increase Hamilton students’ general understanding of terms such as intersectionality through their conversations as well. Some other terms they promulgate include racism, bigotry, white privilege, micro-aggressions, internalized racism, self-segregation, colorism, color-blindness, cultural/language appropriation, “not racist” versus “anti-racist,” ally and allyship, white guilt, the etymology of words, political correctness, trigger warnings, white victimization, oppression, liberation, Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter and the functions of protests. This list is not exhaustive, and there will always be new concepts introduced through continual discussion.
The group has collaborated—and plans to continue collaborating—with club leaders on campus whose issues intersect with race, such as HEAG and community service clubs. Working with Whiteness hopes to aid these clubs by providing them with an improved understanding of how their whiteness affects the work that they do. There are going to be movie screenings, all-campus conversations facilitated by different professors and workshops throughout the semester. So, if you are a student interested in promoting anti-racism on this campus, whether you are white or of color (but particularly if you are white!), then you should get actively involved. The next event hosted by the group will be Thursday, March 9 at 4 p.m. in the Dwight Lounge and facilitated by Mike Boucher. This event will be a workshop that aims to identify, name and explore intersections of privilege and oppression in students’ lives.
I feel that Working with Whiteness can provide white students with a powerful space to understand their whiteness as a racial category and to understand how their privilege operates, specifically at Hamilton. Through this understanding, the group hopes to provide these students with a framework to comprehend how their privilege will operate in future communities to which they belong. Many Hamilton students will go on to hold a lot of power in this world, and on a predominantly white campus, Working with Whiteness aims to provide the tools to well-intentioned white people to further develop anti-racism in their future careers or communities. I think it’s a pretty great step, and I am very proud to say that Hamilton has such a group organizing and working on our campus. I only hope that more white students get involved and informed.