Race and identity have inspired a lot of dialogue among Brown students in recent years, but a new discussion group on campus plans to approach those topics with an unusual tack directed specifically toward white people.
The new group, called White People Talking, will have its first official event today. Though students of any race can attend the workshop - which asks "What is White?" - the talk will focus on "asking the really fundamental questions" of white identity and how white students view themselves racially, said Dan Beckman '10, co-founder of the group.
The idea for the group grew out of informal weekly discussions that Beckman and Owen Hill '10, organized last semester.
The two were introduced by a mutual friend who knew both were interested in creating "a space where white people were comfortable speaking in productive ways about race," Beckman said. He and Hill corresponded over the summer and began holding Friday discussion groups in Hill's dorm room.
"Race talk shouldn't be limited to students of color," said Hill, adding that his long-term goal is to create a "white allies" program to complement the Minority Peer Counselor program run by the Third World Center.
"The idea is to expand the MPC discussion to the white community without MPCs having to go confront white people," he said.
White students may lack the language and self-awareness, Hill said, to speak about race at the same "level of discussion" as minority students who have been more encouraged to discuss racial identity.
"The first step is to start to talk about this," he said.
Andrew Migneault '11, a white student who attended the Third World Transition Program two years ago as a freshman, said he was glad to hear that a campus group was "looking for the opportunity to let whites talk about racial issues."
He said it was "naive" to assume that only students of color have conflicts about their ethnicity.
In addition to workshops on the last Friday of each month, White People Talking will continue its "more intimate" Friday discussions, said Crystal Vance '11, who will be one of the facilitators of today's event, which will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Morriss-Champlin lounge.
Beckman said white students often speak about race in the abstract, especially in classroom settings, but the group hopes to focus on "the personal and the intimate as much as possible."
White People Talking is currently unaffiliated with the TWC, though Vance is an MPC and the group's coordinators have consulted with MPCs and students of color on how to effectively lead discussions about race, Vance said.
Due to what he called a "bad coincidence," Friday's workshop was accidentally scheduled at the same time as a TWC event commemorating the 1968 student walkout, which ultimately led to the creation of the MPC program and TWTP, Beckman said.
The scheduling conflict is "precisely the message we don't want to send," he added.
Though it was too late to move the workshop once the overlap was discovered, the coordinators emphasized on the workshop's Facebook event page that White People Talking wants to be "a complementary presence on campus in solidarity with the TWC."
