Civil war breaks out between the diverse grievance groups. There was no consensus on which group was the most oppressed.
This year’s University of California Students of Color Conference unproductively devolved into something of an “oppression Olympics” between different minority groups, prompting arguments between participants and ultimately leading to some canceled sessions at the annual event.
UCLA student Jacqueline Alvarez told The College Fix as much in a recent telephone interview, standing behind an op-ed she wrote in the Daily Bruin campus newspaper detailing the same.
She described the conference not only as an “oppression Olympics” but also “a safe space gone wrong” in her opinion article.
Ralph Washington, president of UC Student Association, which organized and hosted the conference, confirmed there were “tensions” at the mid-November gathering, and that its schedule was altered.
“The Students of Color Conference is always a space when tensions get a little high,” he said in a phone interview with The College Fix. “This mirrors that nature of our lived experiences. But this year there was a lot of harm thrown around to the various organizers, and some people came into the conference without understanding what the theme of the conference was. There are constructive things that we can do to prevent this happening in the future.”
“I think that sometimes in conferences schedules are changed to meet a more pressing need. It isn’t a problem when those who are organizing the conference change things around to meet the needs of participants,” Washington said.
The crux of the debate centered around the conference theme: “Fighting Anti-Blackness.” Apparently it was not communicated to students that the conference would have a particular theme this year. At the event, held at UC Irvine, students of different minority groups began arguing when it became known that the conference would focus almost exclusively on discrimination against the African American community.
In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East, according to Alvarez.
This exchange, and others like it, resulted in the cancellation of several sessions on the second day of the conference, Alvarez said. Above all, conference participants each wanted to focus on their own particular minority issue, she said.