A Day ON For Dr. King

Every year on the established Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Willamette celebrates by awarding students a half-day of classes. Or, that's how many see it. Actually, after a morning of classes, students are encouraged to attend lectures, panels, speakers, and workshops on campus, and community service learning opportunities in the Salem area. In my Racial Justice Movements course, to make sure we were not seeing this as a day "off," but rather a day "on," one of our assignments was tied to attending an event. Part of what we're learning about social movements in general is that people need to be seen and heard, or at least have used this kind of a presence to attract attention in past and current movements. So, our assignment was to attend an event and "represent" for American Ethnic Studies, AES. Most fulfilled this assignment by asking questions and introducing themselves as AES students, some presented in panels or other presentations, and some even made t-shirts and stickers saying "I'm an AES student."

A friend and classmate, Jenne, organized a panel dedicated to discussing privilege. She asked me to be a "specialist," handling the white privilege section of the panel. We had other "specialists" speaking about their own Christian, able-bodied, heterosexual, class, and male privileges. I put "specialists" in quotations, because one of the things we each emphasized most was the amount of personal tension and questioning that is involved when confronting privilege. None of us would claim to be an expert, but each of us is making a concious effort to address and struggle with our own privilege.

Jenne opened with about 15 minutes of Privilege 101, explaining how it works, different categories of privilege, how it is often unrecognized and denied, and then handed it over to the panelists to share personal experiences. Each of us had an allotted 6 minutes to address virtually anything we wanted under the umbrella of our privilege category. We had a packed room, and after each of us had shared there were plenty of questions to run us over the set time. Several students approached the panel after our time was up to clarify, disagree, question, and show a genuine interest in continuing the conversations started in the room. Pretty cool deal, actually. I've heard there were blogs started in response, and people have been talking about it all week in their classes. I was really, really proud of those who stuck their necks out to become more human, admitting to some of the ugliest flaws in our humanity, and taking ownership of identities that are not just nor admirable, but real.