Are we missing the point of the Diversity Summit?

By Aarushi Phalke ‘20

Participants in the Diversity Summit session "The Erasure of Asian Americans in Contemporary America" Photo courtesy of Catlin Gabel School.

Since tenth grade, I have focused a lot of effort in the diversity, equity, and inclusivity work at Catlin Gabel School (CGS). At 15 years old, I was trying to understand who I was, how the labels people give me hold meaning to myself and others, and how they made me unique. What does it mean to be a woman of color, a child of immigrants, a student at an expensive private school? How can I hold all these labels together? 

Since starting to work with the Office of Inclusion, I fully embraced the idea that every student increases the school’s diversity. We all have stories to share, and all of us should have this space to share such stories. One opportunity for that is the annual Diversity Summit.

Each year, CGS dedicates a day filled with workshops, affinity spaces, performances, and more to talk about diversity and inclusion with members of other schools. In the Diversity Summit, students in the Upper School (US) and Middle School (MS) are required to participate. 

The purpose of the Diversity Summit is “to celebrate and educate each other about the diversity in our school community… giving students a chance to take various leadership roles, fostering connections between our student body and students from other local schools, and inviting folks from outside the school community to take part as workshop presenters or even as keynote presenters (to provide a broader range of perspectives from which we can learn),” Brett Mathes, US Inclusion Coordinator and US English teacher, explained over email.

The event brings the community together and is mostly run by students, giving them the ability to make the day what they want it to be.

“Each year, many students and adults take leadership roles in creating and planning different elements of the conference – and the whole community works very hard to make it happen,” said Mathes.

I used to love going to the Diversity Summit, as I used to hold the labels I identify with very closely as a way to connect with people who share some of those labels and to see myself as a part of something bigger. 

However, the catch about labels is that while they have the ability to empower, connect us with one another, and help us understand systems of power, they also have the ability to oversimplify our experiences down to a few words. 

The labels I have seen us focus on tend to include race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion to name a few, but we leave out parts of our identity such as education, ability, language, and socioeconomic status. When we simplify our experiences down to certain labels, our conversations start veering towards a different path, which can be dangerous.

At one affinity group I participated in for people of color at the 2019 Diversity Summit, I remember we went around in a circle and talked about ways in which people of color face racism. Students brought up small microaggressions like weird looks at airports to larger macroaggressions like murder, fetishization that leads to rape, and systemic socioeconomic disadvantages. 

At that moment, I felt torn. On the one hand, these stories helped me feel connected to a larger group of people who face this kind of oppression and who look like me. On the other hand, most of the students in that affinity group had never faced these larger aggressions themselves, and those stories were not ours to identify with. While I am a person of color, there are so many other parts of my identity that give me privilege and lower my chances of facing these macroaggressions.

Talking about one aspect of our identity at a time is extremely difficult as we are all multi-faceted human beings, and I realized I was holding these labels so close to me because I did not want to talk about my privilege. I did not want to talk about how I play a part in oppressive systems, nor did I want to address that while I bring a unique story to CGS, I also add to the homogeneity of the school. I am a high-achieving student from an upper-middle class background who is going from an elite and exclusive institution into another elite and exclusive institution for higher education.

CGS is far from being representative of the general population or Portland’s demographics and almost all of the Diversity Summit workshops do not contextualize or even discuss privilege. When we frame events like the Diversity Summit as times to embrace the existing diversity among us, we naturally focus on all the many ways in which we are oppressed. While that makes sense, the way we focus on labels plays into the irony that at such an elite and exclusive school, the Diversity Summit does not address such topics of justice, equity, and privilege.

We’re in rooms full of some of influential youth, and yet we would rather learn “how to talk” or “recognize the diversity within us already.” Of the 36 workshops offered this year, only one or two had some focus on the fact that if there are oppressed people, there also must be oppressors. 

“I think we need to start the planning earlier. I also think we could do a better job of framing and preparing the workshops with the help of faculty advisors so students get a little more guidance on how to facilitate a successful workshop and have productive conversations or at least have more time to develop their ideas,” Jasmine Love, the Director of Inclusion and Outreach at CGS, wrote over email.

We rarely talk about what to do with the privileges we have. We phrase things by saying, “We talk about race so much. Why can’t we talk about...” pitting social justice issues against one another instead of actually talking about other issues besides race.

Diversity Summit still has the positive attributes I recognized at 15 years old in helping students recognize their stories. However, the event also functions as a way for students to continue diverting conversations of justice and privilege. It makes us feel more progressive than other elite institutions rather than putting in the work towards hiring a diverse staff, increasing financial aid, setting real requirements for community engagement, giving more support and mental health care to students, closing the achievement gap, etc. 

We are trained as CGS students to never question the fairness, equity, and justice of an elite educational institution such as this one. We instead throw around the terms “diversity” and “inclusion,” which, while having value, distract our attention away from the social and economic injustice of privileged students like myself getting higher quality education that will make us more privileged and further cycles of inequality. 

I’m tired of avoiding these conversations. Without a focus on all aspects of our identity, including our privileges, we will never live up to the change that we want to see, and these systems of power will remain in place.