By Sako Chapman
Equity Symposium: “YOU ARE ENOUGH.” Healing Towards Belonging and Collective Liberation. April 19-20, 2023.
The first thing I want to say about the Equity Symposium is that it wasn’t any different than what I had expected. It brought a successful amount of events together, had a lot of good catering, and brought the biggest name speaker to campus that Evergreen has seen in years. It affirmed “enoughness,” whatever you take that to mean, and provided a great bit of fun for staff and admin.
Equity Symposium 2023 was also painful for me, for any amount of identity tags I could list off and interactions I had as a student both working and attending the event. But more succinctly, more fully, the week of Equity Symposium rendered unavoidable issues in the broader campus environment that permeate every day of my experience here. Many of these things are not unique to Evergreen, nor caused by any one leadership individual. But I’d like to expose their cycles and record this institutional memory. I’ll do this through my archival understanding of internal history and my own personal impression. I hope that any of this orients you more to the contextual sphere of this college.
Equity Symposium is the reinterpretation of Evergreen’s Day of Absence/Day of Presence tradition, which originated in 1987 at Evergreen’s Tacoma Campus. The Tacoma Campus, located in the Hilltop area, has always served predominantly Black and Brown students, many in an older age demographic with full-time jobs and families to support. Day of Absence was created for students, staff, and faculty of color as a brief moment of connection, recognition, and healing away from the college. Its occurrence thereafter was organized by iterations of the First Peoples Coalition at the Olympia campus. As First Peoples transformed from a union of students of color groups to an established office supporting the needs of POC within the college, Day of Absence transformed with it. Day of Presence was added as a second day to the DOA agenda later down the line as an opportunity for the whole student body to come together in what I imagine was a similar workshop fashion to Equity Symposium.
We lost this tradition following the final DOA/DOP in May of 2017, after the request to hold Day of Absence on campus in an empty lecture hall rather than as a retreat was narratively twisted into a ban of white people from campus by a former faculty member. While it was these comments that sparked initial protest, it is essential to recognize that the massive mobilization of students exploded from lifetimes and legacies of inequity experienced in the world, all of the ways the Evergreen State College perpetuates these injustices, and a desire for transformation in the community most accessible to them. As students organized to demand tangible changes in the institution, viral footage turned Evergreen into a target for right-wing hate groups and media. The protests of 2017 could have happened during any year, at any moment. But it is the trauma caused by the outside interlopers that make it so difficult to talk about. For every news article about the ‘wokest college in America violating free speech,’ Evergreen community members were fending off harassment and gun threats. Staff, students, and faculty– particularly the Black staff of the First Peoples Support Services– were filmed, targeted, and doxxed while advocating for themselves. Even though most people who directly experienced the harassment have since left the college, their teachers and colleagues still remain. The conditions that sparked the protests still remain.
Additionally, and not insignificantly, the Evergreen’s Police Services was able to acquire five AR-15s without public notification during the summer of 2017. The rifles were purchased under former President George Bridges with the signature of then Vice President of Finance and Operations John Carmichael. This was a spit in the face to the explicit student demand for the “disarming of the police’s lethal and less than lethal weapons.” The anti-racist protests erupting from the student body had called for cops off campus, both to confront the oppression inherent in maintaining a police force and for the Evergreen Police’s history of harassment towards Black, Transgender, and community members of color. For more examples of such interactions, please search “police’’ on cooperpointjournal.com. For a better archival visualization of the history of police on campus, please see page 14.
Administration opted for conflict avoidance around 2017 in the aftermath. DOA/DOP was deemed “too controversial” to hold again for its association with the media blowout. Following an exiled effort of students to revive Day of Absence, Evergreen returned in 2019 with its plans for Equity Symposium. The newly retitled First Peoples Multicultural Trans and Queer Support Services was given central planning tasks, a responsibility it would maintain through its near-annual student and full-time staff turnovers before the office stabilized in 2022. The Symposium was to be something new to bring together a community that has lost much trust and endured much trauma. But the school would no longer support a POC-only space. I am not under the impression that DOA/DOP was some wonderful, radical space fully dissimilar from the faults of Equity Symposium. But I wish to note how devastating the loss of a POC-centered event feels in the face of all the ways some urgent demands to the college were compromised. An event born out of a need to connect POC as an organized voice between campuses evolved now into a vague celebration of equity. This work for Equity Symposium fell upon staff and faculty of color; upon Black women of color; upon Trans and Queer people, to hold a new “diverse and inclusive” event for the Evergreen State College.
This was my second year working the Equity Symposium, but the first year it has fully returned in person. The dynamics of working the event this time were different. For one, my historical context had grown. My understanding of scale was much different as well. Most faculty don’t make time for the event, and it lands squarely during most class schedules. Student attendance is low, and most attendees end up being staff and administration. I also learned what an “all-office event” truly looks like. From the opening ceremony to the final keynote, Police Services made their presence known. With guns at their sides, they planted themselves and their cars in visible entryways, smiling and waving toward admin tables. Squarely in the center of the entry hall, they clutched their belts and nodded to speeches on “community” and “enough-ness.”
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I lean on the wall in the House of Welcome with the officers in the corner of my eye as we move from feel-good affirmations to group discussions. There are almost 170 people in attendance, and I hate how tight my chest feels as we rearrange ourselves. We’re prodded to reflect upon our personal experiences with healing, grief, and belonging. While I cannot will any vulnerability with police so close by, the only white boy in my group snatches any lapse in silence as his opportunity to share his thoughts. He does not invite new voices, instead acts as if discussion is a race to be won. I’d take this any day over having to pair with a cop and discuss a Maya Angelou quote.
I work the lunch service after the ceremony is over. At the break I check my work email, confirming something I mentally flagged during the Land Acknowledgement. Kara Briggs, Vice President of Tribal Relations, Arts, and Cultures will not be returning for the next year.
I read that there will be no more separate division for Tribal Relations, Arts, and Cultures to hold the House of Welcome’s public service center. This is the center responsible for building non-exploitative relationships with tribal nations and for bolstering the cultural network of Indigenous artists in this area. They will be re-merging into the Academic Division come July. Even though it’s clarified that the work of this Division and center will be maintained, I can’t stop the feelings that erupt from hearing that “for the betterment of tribal relations”, we will no longer have a Division for Tribal Relations. That even though all of the projects will be continued, this change will likely translate to a delegation of vice president responsibilities among people whose titles will not change along with it. I resign to the hope that this decision was made as a collaboration and that this work will be fairly compensated by the institution.
The next day I watch a drag queen recite a storybook between routines from the information booth in Evans Hall. This is after I once again clock Evergreen police, standing with their guns at the “community gathering.” The cops are made to feel included at our “community gathering.” I see a few staff members cast worried glances but they’ve surrendered to trying to get their jobs done, as if it’s a fight they’ve lost before. I can’t help but laugh at the optics of this spectacle. Drag queens performing for a delightedly rigid staff audience, a sparse scattering of students with popcorn at tables. Cops on the sidelines, arms crossed, poking at small cups of ice cream. I recognize them for the times they’ve approached my friends unwarranted and shuffled, egos bruised, to tear down a ‘Cops Off Campus’ poster. I think about the absurdity of having to label any space that welcomes cops as equity, in the face of every oppression they represent. No form of equity will ever exist with cops in the room.
I talk far too openly in the clay workshop but I am so exhausted. I feel gross, stuck in the same dance of “uplifting diverse experiences” that is so un-unique to Evergreen, but so constant to my time here. Everything is coming to a head at this moment, and as I bounce up and down on the yoga ball it’s like every frustration is shaken loose. Stolen promotional photos of me and my friends in our few moments between class and work, surely used for diversity marketing. The way press releases on disabled students have been used in similar fashion; yet all the ways this place struggles to accommodate my disabled peers. My sinking feeling that consolidating LGBTQ+ needs and support for students of color in one office placed too much demand on too few people these past years, and that this work will always struggle to be sustainable. I think of how the newest BSU effort was pelted with requests for appearance before they even got a first meeting together. How high the Latinx student group, Familia’s plate has been stacked with “collaborations” taking far more time and effort than any person should be doing unpaid. Even the mental toll on the Symposium planning team seems obvious. These labors are being taken and then showcased in the name of inclusivity, without broader administrative change. And I feel too tired to even name all the ways it’s happening.
I’ve been working on campus since 10:30 and I don’t have the time to head home. While pacing the steps of the CRC where my coworkers are setting up for Alok’s keynote, I catch the Evergreen cops parking their car out front again. In the gym, Alok’s comedy loses me at times. Several times. I don’t understand how making a fashion joke from waves of transphobic legislation is cathartic, and it feels like the distance from me to the stage is immeasurable. These are the jokes that don’t feel like they’re for my enjoyment, trans enjoyment, but rather to relieve tension in the broader audience. My friends and I laugh too hard, too loud at the jokes about being brown, and even through the dark I feel eyes whip into us. I’m reminded in this moment that I barely hear of Alok talking directly to trans people of color, how we might be able to hold on better to our politicized queerness. Their jokes provide no class analysis.
In the spotlights of the Q&A, I have a hard time agreeing with them on the matter of seeing humanity in fascists, or at least acting upon it. This answer leads directly to another question about fashion. Even in all their advocacy for the opposite, they’ll still always be tokenized like this. It hurts me to recognize. As the hour draws to a close, Alok sends a final message to the trans people in the audience. Gripping the mic close, they tell me that they’re glad I stuck around. Part of me keeps waiting for them to tell me “YOU ARE ENOUGH” so the credits can roll.
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Equity Symposium is the tireless planning of the college’s diversity staff and the scrambled volunteer shifts of the school’s student laborers. It’s the two day agenda of workshops and popcorn machines, and a break from the Aramark menu. It’s the hope for community engagement, dialogue, and transformation and yet the thing that some students won’t even see once in their years here.
For all it tangibly is, Equity Symposium is also the symbol of all the problems with this institution that I cannot let go. It’s the failure to acknowledge the past directly and the belief that the protest demands from 2017 are not persistent conditions. It’s the constant struggle for connection within the student body, and the fractured legacy of students of color as an organizing force. It’s the college’s evolution towards a more profitable neoliberal model and the bastardization of the campus life that once gave Evergreen its character. It’s the un- and under-compensated labor from marginalized staff, faculty, and students. On the backs of their efforts, Equity Symposium is the school’s most obvious progressive flashbang. The space to discuss “Collective Liberation” from structural injustice with the police sat at the table next to you. The place to see administrators–with the most power to enact changes at the school–enjoy equity as a celebration rather than a list of needs to be met.
Evergreen is not going to symposium
its way into equity.
Evergreen as an institution is not
doing enough.
And Evergreen as a community
deserves more.
One day, I dream of a forum where we have our voices heard. Where we gather as students en masse, and our needs can be centered and enacted alongside those whose positions the college has based its progressive reputation on. That day where we will regain control of our communication, our education, and the resources built for us. This is what I think we deserve. And some day, though perhaps on a scale bigger than Evergreen, it is what we will have.
Got thoughts on what Evergreen should do better? Memories to record? Experiences to share? From one peer to another, get in contact with me at
sako.cpj@gmail.com.
illustrations by Sako Chapman
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