Politics major Claire Floyd-Lapp begins her thesis with with a confession:

“I am undeniably a foodie.”

It’s a statement that, according to Floyd-Lapp, can carry a sense of shame.

“A passion for food, and especially sweets, seems … frivolous and elitist. Superficial. Fun, but indulgent,” she said.

But in her thesis, Floyd-Lapp wanted to push against this view — to see pleasure as something that goes beyond the superficial. For Floyd-Lapp, pleasure itself is political.

Floyd-Lapp’s love for food runs in the family: her mother was a co-founder, columnist and editor for the local food centered website Culinate and a passion for food has led Floyd-Lapp to a number of restaurant and bakery jobs.

“There’s this whole choreography to work in a restaurant,” Floyd-Lapp said. “I really like juggling — working on ten things at once, writing prep lists and figuring out how it’s all going to happen. …  And then knowing that it will be shared — that I’m making something that I’m passionate about and that helps create this experience for someone else.”

In recent years, Floyd-Lapp has found that making food provided a “tangible counterpoint to school.”

“I’ve really grappled with the esoteric part of school,” she said. “My thesis began with this gap I felt between academia and my work in restaurants, and the farther I fell into both the more distant I felt as a politics major from being a pastry chef. And so the desire for finding meaning in both pushed me to reconcile pleasure and politics.”

The politics of food often boil down a question of Calories: who has access to sufficient sustenance? The experience of cooking or joy sharing a tasty meal with friends is disregarded in favor of an instrumental rationality that sees food as a matter of input: means to the end of a functioning body.

For Floyd-Lapp, an example of this comes with the Trump Administration’s recent proposal to replace half of the benefits coming from SNAP, a federal food assistance program, with what would be known as a “Harvest Box” full of non-perishable food pre-selected by the federal government.

“It’s touted as this efficient proposal that would save billions of dollars … [but] I think [it] really misses the question: who has access to pleasure?”

In academia, as well as in politics, questions of pleasure can be sticky, often decried as mere avoidance of more “serious” political concerns. For Floyd-Lapp, such a view is symptomatic of a limited political imagination.

“I argue for an imaginary that includes policy change and the recognition of pleasure as political,” she writes in her thesis.

To examine the relations between food, politics and pleasure, Floyd-Lapp decided she would have to move beyond the confines of books and articles and into the realm of embodied inquiry — exploring feelings of pleasure, or a lack of pleasure, in relation to consuming food.

This is where Soylent comes in.

A meal replacement drink with the tagline “Let’s take something off your plate,” Soylent brands itself on the premise of an efficient and messless meal. “Twist… lift… and eating is solved,” the website declares. As if eating were a problem.

For Floyd-Lapp, consuming Soylent rather than a traditional meal raises a number of questions: “how does one’s relationship with food and people change when sustenance is primarily about an efficient response to a biological need rather than a pleasurable part of life? What happens when cerebral critique is not the only method [of analysis]?”

For the experiential portion of her thesis, Floyd-Lapp recruited five other Whitman students who, along with herself, were given a week-long schedule with instructions to gradually replace meals with Soylent. On the last day, participants replaced all three meals. The students kept journals during the week, excerpts from which Floyd-Lapp included in her final thesis. When the weekend arrived, she hosted a dinner party for the participants, providing a contrast to their experience throughout the week as well as a space to debrief.

Floyd-Lapp emphasized that the goal of this experience was not to be comprehensive or representative. She saw herself not as a researcher, but as a fellow participant in the process of “making meaning.”

The journal entries reveal a variety of reactions to Soylent — some participants felt energized and more productive with their schoolwork, while others, lethargic or jittery.

“I think all of us spent more time in the library than we normally do,” Floyd-Lapp said. “I didn’t have a reason to leave the library. Theoretically I could have done a lap around Ankeny or something, but I didn’t need to, so I just sat in the Quiet Room, and really missed the five minute walk back to my house and then standing and touching, and moving and cutting and cooking and eating.”

Common amongst participants was a shift in their social lives while consuming the drink.

“For everyone, there was something in the week that they didn’t do with their friends, because they couldn’t eat or drink,” Floyd-Lapp said. “Some people had traditions. A lot of people, especially, talked about missing out on their housemates’ lives — that eating was this way of spending time with people in an otherwise really busy life. No one had said, ‘hey everyone, we should all drink Soylent together’ at any point during the week. It was all on the go, or drinking in the library in this very utilitarian, functionalist way.”

By contrast, Floyd-Lapp said, “the dinner party was four or five hours and there was nothing productive about it.”

“It was really incredible. No one pulled out their phones the whole time. There was this presence through sharing food together that I definitely didn’t feel during the week,” she said. “The week was just frenetic, and I felt like I was multi-tasking more than I ever do. It became this kind of scarily addictive way of thinking. I just kept thinking about cutting more and more minutes. More time, more time, more time. There was just this relentless pace to the week that wasn’t there during the dinner.”

Floyd-Lapp sees policies like the Harvest Box as eerily similar to Soylent. The brand also claims to help the hungry, by donating products and money to food banks. While this isn’t a bad thing necessarily, Floyd-Lapp emphasizes,  that we should think beyond food as an issue of efficient consumption of Calories and nutrients.

Concluding her thoughts on the experience, Floyd-Lapp wrote, of the dinner party, that she felt “present.”

“I wasn’t trying to get anywhere else — I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Even later, overwhelmed with dishes, I felt happy to be wrapping up the evening with warm, sudsy hands and drippy candles I wasn’t ready to blow out. I wanted to hold on to the feeling of a full house whiled away doing — according to Soylent — nothing useful.”

The story of Megan Gleason’s senior thesis began in a French class called “Épistolaires” or epistolaries — the study of literature in the form of a series of letters. Focused on the late eighteenth century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuse by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the class examined how a letter can function as a literary form and, in particular, how the theme of physical distance between characters plays into a novel.

After finishing with Les Liaisons, students made their way to the archives to examine historical letters through a literary lens. Presented with various options of letter collections to analyze, Gleason was drawn to a wooden box labeled “Osgood Letters to Wife.” According to Gleason, no one had opened it. At least not recently.  

“There’s no record of it,” Gleason said. “Whoever took it in didn’t write in that they had it anywhere. So they just found it in the archives. It was very mysterious.”

The first surprise, upon opening the box, was that the letters were from France. Some were even written in French. The second was that the letters were addressed to Bainbridge Island, Gleason’s home town west of the Cascades.

The box contained about sixty letters, most in English, but a few in French. Sent between 1917 and 1918, the letters detail Robert Osgood’s experience while stationed in France during World War I. Prior to leaving for the war, Osgood worked as a teacher and Protestant minister on Bainbridge. Though not officially ordained, his wife, Anna, to whom the letters are addressed, often delivered sermons in his absence. After the war Osgood made his way back to the states and taught French and Spanish at Whitman for a period of time in the 1930s before returning to Bainbridge. Gleason reckons this is why the archives have his letters.

Gleason’s thesis has two parts. The first examines how the letters functioned to maintain the relationship between Robert and Anna Osgood, while the second explores how Osgood portrayed the war.

A graduate of the Chicago Theological Seminary, Osgood’s thesis focused on marriage; Gleason has drawn on it for help understanding the role that letters played in the Osgoods’ relationship.

She says one line of the thesis, in particular, has influenced her study: “The love of husband and wife broadens and deepens with the increasing community of their experience.” Gleason said the thesis has inspired her to think about how Osgood creates a shared experience — and a shared community — through his letters.

While stationed in France, Osgood worked at an organization called Les Foyers du Soldat (The Soldier’s Living Room) that was eventually partnered with the American YMCA. According to Gleason the organization provided canteens for American and French soldiers that also functioned as cultural centers. Soldiers could visit to play sports, write letters or socialize.

Osgood worked at a center for French soldiers, affording him the opportunity to build a network of friends across national borders. He went on bike rides through the countryside, visited friends at their homes and endeavored to introduce Anna to his new companions. Not only did Osgood write his own letters to Anna, but he also forwarded letters he received from French soldiers so that Anna could practice French and “meet” some of his friends.

“There’s this really interesting network of community that he’s trying to build,” said Gleason. “That’s [one] thing I’ve been talking about in my thesis — how he’s sustaining this relationship [with] his wife and introducing her to this broader group of people through literally sending her their letters.”

One of such people was a professional cyclist who had completed the Tour de France five times. While Gleason’s thesis was focused on a literary analysis of the letters, she said she found the historical aspects of the research exciting.

“I didn’t realize how much I loved digging up information,” she said. “I think I scared my advisor a little bit … I had a lot of fun just with that part.”

Beyond the letters, Gleason gathered background information from church records and Ancestry.com, which she said had a surprising number of public records available. Even with this background though, piecing together the letters often remained a challenge.

The collection only includes letters received by Anna, not those she wrote back to her husband. Slow and flawed mail service during the war also presented difficulties. Gleason said that sometimes letters would arrive in bundles and if letters from Anna had been delayed, Osgood would be writing “into the void.”

“How do you maintain a conversation if one side is delayed by the post office?” she wondered.

On that front, Gleason said Osgood’s clarity attention to detail was helpful. He often carefully described which of her letters he was responding to.  

For all their detail, though, the letters said little about the more brutal aspects of the war, focusing instead on Osgood’s jaunts through the French countryside, experience riding in an airplane and descriptions of friends.

The omission of war-related information became problematic as the year went on. Responding to Osgood’s laments at how much he missed her, Anna suggested she come to France and volunteer — an idea that Osgood quickly countered. After introducing Anna to a number of his friends, Gleason said, Osgood is eventually “forced to admit that people are dying.” Their “community of experience,” as Osgood described it, necessarily included those more painful experiences as well.

The Osgoods never had children, and Gleason reckons, at present, she may know more about the couple’s lives than anyone else, not to mention having her own intimate knowledge of their shared hometown. Given their lack of descendants, Gleason is thankful for the opportunity to connect with them in her own way.

“Every time I look at how much was saved … I’m just so thankful that that box exists,” said Gleason. “It makes me think of how many people have letters that they think no one would want to study, but could be really informative and helpful to someone like me.”

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship provides graduates one year out of college with the opportunity to explore a project of their choosing. Given a stipend of $30,000 for the year, students travel to various countries, exploring a thematic, but not necessarily academic, project. This year, two Whitman seniors received the award. The Wire sat down with each of them to learn about their plans.

When she applied for the Watson Fellowship last fall, senior Zuhra Amini knew she wanted her project to involve art. A Race and Ethnic Studies major, Amini was looking for a break from traditional academics and an opportunity to pursue her creative endeavors. She also wanted to build community along the way.

Amini’s project, titled “Restless Endeavors: Disaporic Cultural Production,” will take her on a journey through the United Kingdom, Germany and France where she will spend time at studios, lectures and art shows to explore the work created by disaporic communities.

“The main question that I have is: how is diasporic art pushing national boundaries?” Amini said.

Amini’s interest in diasporic art grew out of the film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour. Often dubbed the “first Iranian vampire western” the film takes place in a fictional location titled “Bad City” — not quite Iran but not quite the United States, either. Responding to a question regarding the location of the film, Amirpour declared “it’s set in my brain.” Amini cited that interview in her project proposal for the fellowship as evidence of the ways in which art can transcend, or challenge, the boundaries of nation states.

Amini analyzed the film for two classes within her major, in addition to writing her senior thesis about it. Having immigrated from Afghanistan at an early age, Amini has a personal connection to understanding diaspora as well.

“When I saw the film I was like ‘this [is] how I feel.’ …. I’m not Iranian, but this notion of what it feels like to be in a diaspora — the film encapsulates that. Feeling like you don’t necessarily belong in one or the other place, but at the same time there are ways you do belong.”

For Amini, a sense of belonging can be nurtured through the creation of art.

As a Studio Art minor, Amini has experimented with a number of different mediums at Whitman — both in and out of the classroom. Her principal interest, she said, is “translating ideas into aesthetic forms.” One of Amini’s main projects throughout her time at Whitman is a zine called “Process,” which, while distributed to all of campus, only accepts submissions from people of color. In a Wire article about zines on campus this spring, Amini said that she also likes to think of the publication “as a collective.”

Arriving at Whitman, Amini said she found herself “frustrated” with the lack of community for students of color. Through art, Amini said, she was able to help build this community.  

“My activism is not necessarily marching and rallies. … I want[ed] to build this art community because I feel like I need an art community to survive on this campus.”

Inspired by her own experience building a creative community, Amini will go looking for such communities elsewhere and, if she gets the chance, perhaps even share studio space and make art with the people she meets.

“I was really interested in seeing how other people, in nations which are specifically telling people ‘you don’t belong here,’ how do they organize under those pressures? … What impact does it have on their communities? What impact does it have on the nation itself? Those tensions are really important to me.”

Her decision to travel to the United Kingdom, Germany and France was based on the presence of large immigrant populations in each of those countries. In concert with this is a resurgence of right-wing nationalism in Europe. Amini hopes to observe how such politics are navigated and contested through art.

Amini says that when she talks about her fellowship a lot of people assume she’s looking for art that is overtly political — but that’s not the case.

“I think when people think about works that are political … they instantly think about political art. And don’t think about how art itself is political. Just aesthetic forms in and of themselves, and the subjects they talk about [can] push national boundaries,” said Amini.

She gave the example of Berlin-based artist Moshtari Hilal, who’s work, while sometimes containing an overtly political message, more commonly functions by adding representation to the world of art. Amini is particularly interested in Hilal’s depictions of the Persian face, and how they relate to or challenge European beauty standards. Amini hopes to meet up with Hilal when she travels to Germany.

Many of the artists whose work Amini hopes to interact with are people she’s discovered through various social media outlets — platforms which Amini says have been important for her during the times in which she’s felt isolated at Whitman or in Walla Walla. Through her travels Amini says she hopes not only to connect with artists but also to bring attention to those who seek more exposure.

“I’m interested in how we make room and space for the people that have an impact in our lives. I’m interested in how I can expose more people who are important to me, because I know they’ll be important to other people.”

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship provides graduates one year out of college with the opportunity to explore a project of their choosing. Given a stipend of $30,000 for the year, students travel to various countries, exploring a thematic, but not necessarily academic, project. This year, two Whitman seniors received the award. The Wire sat down with each of them to learn about their plans.

Senior Devin Reese first became interested in old age after reading the book Being Mortal by surgeon and author Atul Gawande. Gawande’s work focuses on what he sees as a shift that needs to take place in the health professions — from a focus on survival to a focus on well-being. Reese said what he learned most from the book was related to “the difficulties of aging in the current era.”

“Right now,” Reese said, “people are living longer than they ever have before. The world is becoming globalized and children are moving away. These factors are all combining into this modern phenomenon of elder care institutions which, already, to a lot of people seem as if they’re the norm, but they’re very new.”

Reese’s Watson Fellowship will take him on a journey to visit some of these institutions in Peru, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Japan — through his travels he hopes to glean some ideas for how elder care institutions could be run differently, and perhaps better, in the United States.

A double major in Biology and Film and Media Studies, Reese has spent time shadowing In hospitals, where he first became interested in geriatrics (the branch of health care dealing with old age). But he says it’s the social, not the biological side of aging that interests him most.

As a junior at Whitman, Reese studied abroad in Copenhagen where he took a European documentary film class. The final project for the class required students to make a short autobiographical films, but Reese decided to do something a little different. His short film “Entropy” follows a 93 year old woman as she goes about her daily gardening. Footage of the garden is combined with an interview Reese conducted with the woman, and interspersed with scenes of man hitting a punching bag — which Reese said represents “a fight against entropy that you can’t win.”

“Entropy,” Reese explains, “[is] the concept of disorder … that everything in the universe is always pushing towards an increase in disorder. You can see it in that your room tends to get more messy.”

While no one knows for sure why we age, a number of studies claim that changes due to aging can be characterized as entropy. 

While in Copenhagen, Reese also had the opportunity to see the award-winning film Alive Inside, which follows social worker Dan Cohen as he travels to nursing homes for dementia patients to explore the impact of music on memory. While Reese noted that the film exaggerated at times, he maintains that “it’s very clear that [music] has the potential to make a huge impact in people’s lives … [the film] shows these very visceral scenes of dementia patients listening to music and really waking up.”

Since the release of the film, elder care institutions around the country have experimented with music and memory. According to Reese, Washington Odd Fellows, just across from Whitman’s campus, is among them.

Reese said the popularity of the film has made led him to consider the power of cinema as a tool for change.

“I’ve been wondering a lot about the question of whether film has the potential to cause systemic change and it’s a very complicated question,” he said. “I’m hopeful about it, but I don’t know the answer yet.”

Spending a year abroad will, of course, pose a host of challenges as well. Reese anticipates that overcoming language barriers will be one of the principal ones, but challenges will be more personal as well.

“I’ll have to confront my own mortality. A lot of people my age just don’t want to think about it at all,” he said. “One of my friends who’s very successful here said ‘my biggest fear is growing old,’ and I was like ‘well, that’s probably going to happen — or something else is going to happen.’ That’ll be tough.”  

Asked what he has planned for the future beyond his Watson, Reese said he’s not quite sure.

“I definitely want to explore aging. I think that’s safe to say. But there’s a lot of routes I could use to tackle it. Medical school, social work, physical therapy, gong heavy on the film making. It’s all there.”

On Monday February 26, 2018 at 6:07 p.m. President Kathy Murray sent an email alerting the Whitman Community that a swastika had been discovered on dry-erase board in a Penrose Library study room Monday morning. Murray reported that the swastika was erased soon after discovery.

“To say this kind of writing is highly inappropriate is an understatement,” Murray wrote in her email. “I want to be very clear: recreating this symbol of hate is reprehensible and behavior like this has no place within the Whitman community.”

As of now, no information has been released about who drew the swastika.

“We are unsure if this act was committed by someone who is part of the Whitman community or not and have spent the afternoon trying to determine who is responsible,” Murray wrote.

“It is my sincere hope that this is an isolated incident,” she added.

This is not the first time white-supremacist propaganda has been discovered in Penrose, however.

Last fall, The Wire reported that white nationalist flyers were discovered between the pages of several books at the library.

Additionally, The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on data released by the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that reveals an upsurge of hate crimes on college campuses in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential Election. According to The Chronicle, the study defined hate crimes as “offenses motivated by biases of race, national origin, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability.”

Murray encouraged those in need of support to contact the Dean of Students Office (527-5158) or the Counseling Center (527-5195).

*Editor’s note Tuesday February 27, 10:10 a.m.: According to an article published today by Inside Higher Ed, the Anti-Defamation League reported that 2017 saw an 89% increase in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses from 2016. 

**Editor’s note Wednesday February 28 6:20 p.m.: The Office of Religious and Spiritual Life has partnered with Hillel Shalom, a Jewish organization for Whitman students, staff and faculty, to create an art project entitled “No Place for Hate.” Members of the Whitman community will have the opportunity to participate in the project by writing a message on a small square that will be mounted and displayed on campus next week. Supplies for the project will be available in the Reid Lobby from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. this Thursday and Friday.

The Wire will continue to update this article as more information arises. Please visit our Contact Us page to get in touch with the editors of The Wire.

Christy Carley is an employee of the Penrose Library Circulation Desk and serves as a student representative on the Library Committee.

Whitman students, staff and faculty gathered at the steps of Penrose Library last Wednesday in support of a petition to designate Whitman College as a “sanctuary campus.” The gathering was part of a national day of action in which students across the country called on their schools to offer protection for undocumented students in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.

Organized by the Borders as Method club (BAM), the gathering followed the circulation of a petition that, as of Thursday, gained over 1,200 signatures from members of the Whitman community past and present, including 100 signatures from faculty members.

Borders as Method is a club that focuses on issues related to immigration and migration justice. The club works to educate the Whitman community about issues related to immigration and migration through events such as “ImMigration Week” last year, which included teach-ins by faculty members and participation in the Walla Walla May Day Rally.  

Last Thursday’s event included student speakers from BAM along with Professor of Politics Aaron Bobrow-Strain, faculty advisor to the club who teaches a class on the U.S.-Mexico border which includes a weeklong educational trip at the end of the year.

What is a sanctuary campus?

In the petition written by BAM, the provision calling on Whitman to become a “sanctuary campus” requests that the school “refuse ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] access to all college owned and contributed properties. … [and] refuse to share the immigration status of our community members with ICE or the police.”

In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memo stating that the officers of ICE are subject to restrictions upon entering a college campus or other “sensitive locations.” The petition claims that this memo puts Whitman in a position to protect its undocumented community members.

In addition to declaring Whitman a sanctuary campus, the petition also requests a specific scholarship fund for undocumented students, the designation of a staff member as an Undocumented Student Advocate and a public statement of support for undocumented students from the college administration.

Why now?

With the election of Donald Trump and subsequent speculation that Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, will play a role in his administration, many foresee a hardening stance on immigration from the federal government.

Kobach, known for his tough stances on immigration, is reported to have joined Trump’s transition team.

Kobach is a co-author of SB-1070, a controversial 2010 Arizona immigration bill, sometimes referred to as the “show me your papers” bill, that requires Arizona police to ask for citizenship papers of those who they suspected to have entered the country illegally.

The possibility of Kobach’s influence within the Trump administration has caused many to worry that the government will harden its stance on immigration and the participation of public officials and other citizens in enforcement.

“[Kobach] wants to extend the border control to include every one of us,” Bobrow-Strain said in his speech.

While according to Bobrow-Strain, such a requirement would be difficult to pass, a more likely route that could be taken by the Trump administration would be to cut federal funding from colleges and universities that do not cooperate with immigration enforcement officials.

“We want to make sure that we are never in the situation to have to make that no-win choice between our financial aid funding for students and reporting on undocumented students,” said Bobrow-Strain.

He emphasized that the movement of colleges and universities to become sanctuary campuses is important, largely because it will put political pressure on the Trump administration.

“The way we do that is by being part of a public, a national, an organized campaign by colleges and universities big and small across the country to stand up now… and make it politically impossible for Kris Kobach and Donald Trump to put us in that situation,” Bobrow-Strain said.

Beyond this, many fear that the Trump administration could repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that was put in place under President Obama in 2012. The program allows children brought to the U.S. before the age of 16 to obtain a driver’s license and work permit. Additionally, DACA makes undocumented students in higher education eligible for certain scholarships.

“DACA has been instrumental in providing a fundamental sense of security for the recipients since it has brought them out of the shadows and into mainstream society,” senior Miriam Zuniga, one of BAM’s presidents said. “The repeal of DACA would invalidate all of the hard work so many undocumented activists have done for years. It would send a message that these young people are not welcomed and need to fear for their safety.”

Moving Forward

The crowd gathered near the steps of Memorial Building to watch as members of BAM delivered the petition to President Murray. Upon receiving the petition, Murray thanked the club for their work.

“I do look forward to working with all of you as we really do work to make this a safe and inclusive campus for all of its members,” Murray said. “I need to study what it actually says, and then I will circle back to you as quickly as I can – I will be in touch and we’ll talk again.”

In the aftermath of the Trump’s election, the club emphasized the necessity to act quickly.

“We promise to hold President Murray accountable to addressing these proposals during this period of great urgency,” BAM member junior Julie Kitzerow said.

On Thursday evening the words of “We Shall Overcome” echoed across the steps of Penrose Library, while candles flickered in the dark. Members of the Whitman community gathered together to mourn the black lives lost to police brutality. The vigil, sponsored by Whitman’s Black Student Union (BSU) included speakers, a performance from a local gospel choir and a silent march.

Cathartic and a Statement

President of BSU, senior Sean Hannah said that it’s important for events like the vigil to be proactive, rather than reactive.

“I think it would be cool if instead of having so many protests that are reactive to big shootings, if we just had more protests that were active and not just a result of something that we hear on the news, but having it be more spontaneous,” Hannah said. “If we just depend on the news then that will cause us to stop protesting if the news stops having these events as their focus.”

Wednesday’s vigil came in the wake of the shootings of Keith Lamont Scott in Tulsa, OK and Terrence Crutcher in Charlotte, NC, but the idea for the event was born in early September, prior to when the shootings took place. While specific names of victims were mentioned, the vigil was meant as a way to honor all black victims of police brutality, addressing the issue in a general sense.

BSU decided early on that the vigil would take on the essence of a memorial. It was intended to help community members form a closer emotional connection with the events that have been taking place across the nation.

Photo by Henry Honzel.

“I hope that [students] can find more of an emotional connection to what’s happening. Not just an intellectual connection,” Hannah said. “This thing is actually affecting real people, and it’s hard to really fully see that if you’re just looking at Facebook articles.”

Opening marks at the vigil were given by Hannah and Professor of Psychology Brooke Vick. After songs led by the choir, the names of recent victims of police brutality were announced and community members marched around around Ankeny Field in silence. BSU member Junior Christopher Cox provided closing remarks. To call attention to the vigil, members of BSU drew chalk outlines of bodies around campus, imitating the chalk lines drawn around bodies at a crime scene.

“It’s both cathartic and a statement,” Cox said.

Cox believes that while many members of the Whitman community may care about issues of racial justice, the proximity of such issues doesn’t always hit home.

“There’s a certain … disconnect in the way that some people might think ‘yes, black people are more likely to be imprisoned or killed or whatever, but that happens in the South or that happens over there, not here. But if people who are black here are able to bring things that do happen here to a larger audience, maybe that will make some sort of breakthrough.”

Cox also hopes that the vigil will serve as a space for grieving and connection.

“If someone needs to be helped in any kind of way, having dealt with the shootings, maybe just the simple fact that we’re doing something about it and that we think it’s important enough to do something about it, is helpful to somebody…I hope if it can, that it does help people,” he said. 

The vigil is held in front of Penrose Library. Photo by Henry Honzel.

Civil Rights Today

Discussions of racial justice on campus will continue Thursday night with a lecture presented by prominent Black Lives Matter activist and senior justice writer for the New York Daily News, Shaun King. The event, sponsored by Whitman Events Board (WEB), will take place at 7:00 p.m. in Cordiner.

King’s lecture, entitled “Civil Rights Today,” will focus on the Black Lives Matter Movement and issues of police brutality.

According to WEB Lectures Director Hannah Poukish, who brought King to campus, the lecture will also mention “ways that the average person can help [with issues of racial justice].”

King’s current endeavours include planning an “Injustice Boycott”  which will begin December 5, the anniversary of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. According to an article by Shaun King, participants in the boycott will be “making a pledge that you will boycott cities, states, businesses and institutions which are either willfully indifferent to police brutality and racial injustice or are deliberately destructive partners with it.”

Photo by Henry Honzel

Specific targets of the boycott will be kept secret until December 5. King plans to provide justifications for each target, as well as describing alternatives to the boycotted entities for those who choose to participate.

King is known for his strong social media presence, and it was on Facebook where Poukish first encountered his activism. She had been following him for about six months, and noticed several other Whitman students followed him as well.

“I was kind of just looking for people who I thought would be a good fit for Whitman, and he was someone who came up a lot on my Facebook page and other social media” Poukish said.

Poukish worked with Assistant Director of Student Activities Katharine Curles to book a time for King to come to campus. As this is Poukish’s first event as Lectures Director, she’s excited about the impact of having someone like King come to campus.

“[King] seems very excited to come and meet students, she said. “I think to actually hear from someone who is actually doing social justice as his career and has a big impact is really important for students to see.”

Where do we go from here?

Both Cox and Budget Manager for BSU junior Alondra Contreras-Cervantes mentioned difficulties they face with racial justice activism while being a student.

“The number one challenge for racial justice activism–I think this can go with any kind of activism though–[is] just trying to balance school with ongoing issues. Because the world doesn’t stop just because you have a chem exam,” Contreras-Cervantes said.

She said she often has to suppress feelings of frustration or sadness when instances of racial injustice happen, at least until school gets a little less busy, but that talking with friends often helps.

Clubs like For Us By Us (FUBU), a club specifically for community members of color, and BSU can provide a valuable space for students and community members to come together and discuss issue of race.

Cox said his reason for joining BSU during his first year at Whitman was, “a feeling of isolation… [from] being a black kid at Whitman, but then also having the news affect you in a certain way–news about shootings and police brutality and all that stuff.”

Unlike FUBU, BSU is open to any community member who wants to join, whether or not they are a person of color. 

Cox described the purpose of BSU as “two pronged.”

The club has both an “inward” and “outward” purpose, meaning it is a place for members of the community to gain support by talking about race related issues they’ve experienced at Whitman, but also has the goal of reaching out to the larger campus community to raise awareness about race issues both at Whitman and more generally.

But reaching out to a majority white audience about issues of race can be difficult.

Photo by Henry Honzel

“I feel like a lot of white people feel scared sometimes, to help or to go to BSU meetings. But I feel like it’s very important for white people to use their privilege,” said Contreras-Cervantes. “They can help out so the whole workload isn’t put on the people of color who face these issues.”

Contreras-Cervantes will serve as Co-Programming Director for the 2017 Power and Privilege Symposium along with Jess Faunt who will serve as this year’s Executive Director. This year’s symposium theme is “Empower.”

“That theme was inspired by a recognition that the symposium in the past has placed the burden of ‘teaching’ our campus about social justice issues on students, staff and faculty who most strongly feel the effects of oppression in their lives,” said Faunt in an email to The Whitman Wire.

Both Contreras and Faunt will be attending a national conference this November entitled “Facing Race” put on by Race Forward, an organization founded in 1981 that conducts research on issues of racial justice and serves as a media outlet. The opening plenary of the conference is titled “Multiracial Movement for Black Lives.”

“I am personally hoping to attend the ‘Showing Up For Racial Justice’ workshop, which is explicitly for white people to learn and discuss how to be better allies in racial justice activism,” Faunt said. “As a white person at a majority white school, I see that most of the white student body is still very uncomfortable talking about race and uncertain of how to be an ally.”

Contreras-Cervantes thinks that while many people would like to help with issues of racial justice, they might feel concerned about, “stepping on toes or taking up too much space.” While she does believe that this can be an issue, she hopes that this concern won’t override people’s desire to make change.

“I’d rather have that than people being passive, because that doesn’t help,” she said.

It was the summer of ‘69 when all incoming students of Whitman College last received a letter encouraging them to refrain from participating in fall Greek organization recruitment. This past  Friday, many first years returned to their dorm rooms to find that a similar letter had been slipped under their door.

This more recent letter, was inspired by the 1969 document that senior Katy Wills discovered in the Whitman Archives while doing research for her thesis. Having long considered the critiques she had of Greek recruitment at Whitman, Wills was struck by the way the older letter resonated with her.

“When reading [the letter] I thought it was really interesting…to see some of the issues that we’re thinking about today, contextualized in the sixties” she said.

Wills contacted three of her friends: seniors Julia Karschney and Lily Monsey, and junior Kyla Rapp–all former members of sororities. The four met on the first Thursday of fraternity recruitment–the day before sorority recruitment began–and set out to draft a similar letter.

The 1969 letter was composed by alumni Peter Snow and Vincent Broze shortly after their graduation. Both identified as members of fraternities in their signatures. In their letter, Snow and Broze accused the Greek system of revealing “policies of self-interest and isolation,” sparking considerable debates surrounding the role of greek life on campus. This year’s letter specifically questions whether or not it would be more appropriate for first year students to wait until the spring semester to participate.

In composing the letter, Karschney cited one of her main goals was to let first year students know about things that she wished she would have known as a first-year.

“I think when each of us [was] thinking about crafting the sentences to make up that letter, it was about ‘what’s the information that we would have wanted as first years that we didn’t have?’” Karschney said.

With this goal in mind, the authors of the letter emphasized the variety of activities and communities available at Whitman outside of the Greek system. The letter lists a number of organizations and clubs on campus, which according to the authors, “Will be less likely to persuade [students] to engage in exclusionary social situations that [they] may feel uncomfortable with in order to maintain membership.”

The authors claim that the current recruitment system does not serve to give students a balanced view of Greek life on campus, but rather to convince students to join in order to sustain the organizations.

“Joining the Greek system is a really big decision and it’s not just a decision about what friends you’re going to have–it’s a decision about what side of a really pretty big divide you’re going to be on on campus, it’s a decision about where your money is going, it’s a decision about the kind of…systems that you’re going to both implicitly and explicitly support,” Rapp said. 

According to Wills, “Sorority recruitment rules specifically are so intensely regulated and regimented. There are very specific things you can say based on the charter and the organization you’re involved in.”

The role of the national Greek organizations was emphasized in the letter, which stated that such organizations are “at their core, elitist.”

Monsey underlined the national organizations as being a large source of the problems associated with Greek life on campus.

“Our implicit critiques of the Greek system aren’t implicit critiques of the people on this campus who participate in the Greek system,” she said. “In my mind it’s a critique of this national system.”

After the letter was completed, the authors collected signatures. Rapp emphasized, however, that apart from the actual text of the letter, the views of the authors are not necessarily shared by those who signed it.

The distribution of the letter took place just before the beginning of sorority recruitment, but the authors mentioned that, were they to do this again, they would have done it earlier.

Senior Mitchell Cutter heard about the letter through a friend and decided to sign it. Cutter was one of the hosts of the “Indie Formal,” an event that took place the first Saturday of recruitment and welcomed first years to attend. Technically speaking, “indie” or “independent” denotes any student who does not participate in the Greek system, but the word has taken on a slightly different meaning from time to time as “independent” students have created their own kind of subculture, taking pride in their non-Greek status.

Cutter says that he wasn’t aware of an indie culture on campus as a first year, but hoped that first year students would hear about the indie party this year.

“The rationale for having that [indie] party at all is that we want to show that you can have fun without being Greek,” said Cutter.

Vice President of Sorority Recruitment Allison Knivila said that while she sees the possibility of Spring recruitment as unrealistic in the near future, she would have been open to a conversation with the authors of the letter had they come had they approached Greek leaders directly.

“The manner in which the letter was distributed made it obvious to us that they were not interested in communication, but rather in making a statement,” Knivila wrote in an email to The Whitman Wire. “Distributing the letter moments before our first event gave us no time to take their opinions into consideration and in my opinion, was a very unproductive way of bringing these concerns to light!”

A group of students chat during recruitment activities this past weekend.

Knivila also mentioned that the letter did not impact the number of students at the first recruitment events.

The IFC declined to comment on the letter but confirmed that fraternity recruitment numbers remained strong.

In terms of how the letter was received, a number of first years said they were initially confused when they began to read it.

“I thought it was [advocating] for Greek life, at the very beginning of it,” said first year Omar Aldahleh.

First years Sarah Smith and Chloe Holaso shared similar confusion. Smith and Holaso are both participating in recruitment, but Aldahleh is not.

Smith said that while she respects what the letter said, she remained interested in the idea of participating in recruitment.

“I didn’t want to limit myself to completely dismissing rushing and missing that experience, because I’ve talked to a lot of people who have rushed, and have been part of a sorority and have become greater people because of it,” Smith said.

Holaso said that the letter didn’t influence her decision of whether or not to participate in recruitment but mentioned that many people she talked with were taken aback by the letter’s wording.

“We were all basically just talking about how aggressive the wording was,” Holaso said. “It was saying everything as an extreme.”

First year Jessica Rodriguez had a similar reaction to Holaso–at first.

“I feel like the letter made me want to rush more. It felt like it was a little bit passive-aggressive and it made me uncomfortable,” Rodriguez said.

But after one day of recruitment, Rodriguez became less interested. At that point, she said that she saw the letter differently.

“It was kind of reassuring, because I probably wasn’t going to commit to any sorority, because there’s a billion things to do for free,” she said.

Aldehlah also dropped recruitment. Though his decision to drop wasn’t on account of the letter, he said he was glad to see students openly engaging with campus issues.

“I’m happy that there are students on campus that are going out and voicing their opinions,” he said. “I think a lot of people were talking about it.”