Club often works with Spectrum Resource Center

By Spenser Hickey and Jamell Brown-Smith
Managing Editor and Transcript Reporter

With more than thirty consistent members at each meeting, PRIDE has become one of the largest non-Greek organizations on campus this year.

Coming together each Thursday night, the group provides a safe space for members of marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as their supporters.

“We try to discuss as many different identities as possible, in order to bring awareness to those identities, and in order to create a safe space for people with identities that might be less understood,” said sophomore Natalie French, president, in an email.

As an example, French listed asexuality as a sexual orientation and nonbinary – not male or female – as a gender identity.

As a safe space, the discussions at each meeting are very private; officers caution all members not to discuss anything mentioned there outside the meeting unless explicit permission is given.

At the start, members regularly introduce themselves with their name, class year, preferred gender pronouns and answer to a question of the week, such as favorite ice cream flavor.

“We also discuss current events and popular media,” French said. “This past meeting, we heard Kyle Simon speak about the scientific logistics behind ‘gaydar,’ and the role of genetics in sexuality and gender identity.”

Simon, a senior who’s co-teaching a course on the biological foundations of sexuality this semester, described how research shows humans can unconsciously distinguish whether someone is heterosexual or non-heterosexual – though this includes a wide range of identities – even if they’ve only seen a cutout of their face or just their eyes.

In general, women are better at this than men, Simon said. Due to issues in finding a large enough sample, participants who identify as nonbinary were not included.

French, who joined PRIDE last year and is also a resident of the Women’s House (WoHo), got involved after her experiences as a member of the queer community at a high school she considers conservative.

When referring to either orientation or identity, members use the term “queer” as a reclaimed slur that has been redefined as a more inclusive term.

Fellow WoHo resident Claudia Bauman, a junior, joined PRIDE this year and compared the experience to her membership in Sisters United (SU), a club that focus on issues affecting women of color.

“(SU) is a lot of reading articles and talking about them,” Bauman said. “I really enjoyed that, I learned a lot about certain authors and journalists and ideas, but PRIDE is more about talking to people about their personal stories. It’s a different way to learn the issues, more personal.”

Partnering with Spectrum Resource Center

In addition to regular meetings, PRIDE also works closely with the Spectrum Resource Center, an office in Hamilton-Williams Campus Center that provides information and programming to the OWU community.

“While I cannot speak for the entire resource center, as an intern I can say that I personally am excited about the growing number of visible queer students on Ohio Wesleyan’s campus, particularly the number of first year students who identify on the queer spectrum,” said senior Spectrum intern Liz Dickson.

“It is also encouraging to see such enthusiastic attendance from first year students as a senior because it means that there will be a significant number of queer student leaders on this campus after I graduate,” Dickson said.

Dickson is also a resident of the Women’s House, and they noted several ways Spectrum and PRIDE will be working together.

“Annual collaborations include our National Coming Out Day event, which provides a safe space for students to share their identities with peers, faculty and administration,” they said.

“We also jointly fund a group of students to go to MBLGTACC (the Midwestern Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference) every year in February. This semester, the Spectrum Resource Center and PRIDE are teaming up to bring a disabled transgender Filipino martial artist to campus to do a poetry performance and self defense workshop for the queer community.”

Junior Zoe Morris, a WoHo resident as well, is another Spectrum intern and leads the Queer Artist of the Month events. For September, she selected Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican painter who was bisexual and open about her relationships both with women and her husband Diego Rivera.

Kahlo, who lived from 1907 to 1954, was also a strong Mexican nationalist who resisted traditional European styles despite criticism from artistic elites.

“(Kahlo) said that she would be better off essentially selling tortillas in a market than in this culture,” Morris said. “She is most famous for her self-portraits.”

During the event, students were invited to create their own self-portraits, often featuring flowers in Kahlo’s style – and many did.

PRIDE Week

So far, PRIDE hasn’t made their presence felt on the campus-wide stage, but that will change next week with PRIDE week, which takes place from Monday Oct. 6 to Friday Oct. 10; National Coming Out Day is Oct. 11.

“During PRIDE Week, we organize ways to bring awareness and recognition to the community,” French said.

They will be tabling throughout the week; events include a performance by spoken word artist J Mase III, a queer trans person of color on Oct. 7. This event was organized by PRIDE Treasurer Alicia Brown, a senior and WoHo resident.

The week closes with PRIDE Prom on Friday, October 10. Other events for PRIDE members specifically will be held during the week.

Beyond PRIDE Week, the club is also focused on increasing membership and discussion of issues in the short term, and an eventual goal of achieving all-gender housing.

“All-gender housing would provide a safe space for trans and non-binary students,” French said.

“As of right now, incoming trans students are placed in medical singles, as the school does not allow them to room with others who share their gender identity.”

“…As members of PRIDE Exec, we have noticed and heard PRIDE members who have a huge need for gender-inclusive housing on campus.”

Past events aimed at raising awareness of the need for gender inclusivity in campus housing have included a presentation on all-gender housing by Rebecca Mosely, then-Assistant Director of Residential Education at Oberlin College, which has all-gender housing options. Her presentation and a following discussion were held at last year’s PRIDE week.

The “Trans-ition Your Outlook” workshops held toward the end of last semester also promoted gender inclusivity, though in more general terms.

Chartwells resumed services Tuesday after repairs

A Delaware sanitarian’s surprise inspection of Smith Hall’s cafeteria got a surprise of its own when a second floor pipe burst, leaking water through the ceiling.

“We really don’t have control over anything like that – nobody does, to be honest,” said Chartwells’ Dining Services Manager, Deanna Park. Due to the leak, they closed Smith for dinner on Monday, Sept. 8.

The Buildings and Grounds staff was repairing the pipe while the sanitarian was assessing Smith dining hall, according to Park. When they fixed it the sudden increase in water pressure burst the older pipe, placed above the cafeteria’s ice cream station. Three ceiling tiles were knocked out as water leaked through, pooling on the floor.

“The fitting was replaced this morning, the affected areas have been cleaned and the ceiling tiles have been replaced,” said Buildings and Grounds Director Peter Schantz on Sept. 9.

“The area was functional again before noon today.”

While Chartwells made the decision to close voluntarily, Delaware sanitarian Karie Sanders was still at the site and discussed the issue with them.

“We try to work closely with facilities when they’re going through moments where they need a little extra assistance to help get things back on the right path,” she said.

With Smith dining closed, Chartwells opened the Faculty Staff dining room in Hamilton-Williams Campus Center as an additional place to pick up food, and opened seating in Bishop Cafe.

While sophomore Robyn Madrishin was working and not affected by the change in options, she noted that the school seemed well prepared, saying there was extra food in Hamilton-Williams.

Park noted that they were able to cook food in part of Smith cafeteria and take it to Hamilton-Williams to help with the additional amount of students eating there.

With the repairs finished Sept. 9, Sanders returned to check the repairs to the pipe and how it was affecting service, and again on Sept. 11 to check progress on several code violations she found – five critical violations and nine standard violations.

“Critical means they are linked to or could be linked to causing foodborne illness, so in that case we get those corrected on the spot, which they were corrected on the spot,” Sanders said.

Sanders has been inspecting Smith Hall for seven and a half years; inspections are unannounced to Chartwells and generally occur every six months. Violations lead to return visits.

“We do corrective action as soon as possible…some of those were corrected before the sanitarian left,” said Park.

“Also we work in cooperation with Buildings and Grounds, they’re helping to get any parts needed, we’re making additional changes to that and we will be re-inspected and we fully anticipate everything to be corrected at that point.”

She emphasized, as did Sanders, that the inspection and pipe break were simultaneous but separate occurrences.

“We had the health inspection, which is normal, we receive one every six months, and we had this added crisis, if you will, that occurred totally coincidental,” said Park.

“They still would have been open (if the pipe hadn’t burst),” said Sanders; if the pipe had continued to leak they would have recommended that Smith close but the code violations did not require it to close.

She had seen similar code issues in the past, all of which were addressed. In the past year the only student complaints received by Delaware General Health District (DGHD) in regard to Smith dining involved improper hand washing.

“We work pretty closely with Ohio Wesleyan,” said Sanders.

“And when we run across those situations, there’s several ways that we can handle them,” said Stephanie DiGenaro, program manager of the Health District’s Food Protection and Public Safety Unit.

“There’s a lot of different ways that they can comply with food code,” she said.

Park said that Chartwells has responded to the violations, which include improper temperature control, surface cleanliness and equipment condition. The dining hall is also receiving assistance from Buildings and Grounds, who also helped clean up after the pipe break.

Chartwells workers are required continuously to check their cooking temperatures during their shift to ensure against undercooking food.

Chartwells also has independent, third party representatives  visit their locations to check the conditions in their dining facilities separately from the local health department.

“It was just really funny timing that the pipe burst while the health inspector was here,” said junior Leslie Alton, who staffs the front desk in Public Safety’s office.

Professor Michael Flamm examines the historical context of Michael Brown’s death

SH: Could you describe how race relations and racial inequality became a leading national issue in the 1960s, especially, and then declined to a certain extent since then?

MF: The Civil Rights movement, the freedom struggle, had of course been going on in the United States for centuries. It gains momentum during World War II, and after World War II, because you clearly can’t lead a fight on behalf of democracy and against fascism overseas and not turn and look at the racism that was prevalent in the United States. The United States in the 1940s, especially in the South, was a segregated nation, an apartheid nation in many respects. And so the Civil Rights movement gains momentum in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1960s, certainly the early 1960s, civil rights is the top domestic issue, Dr. King has become a national figure, everyone in the country is aware of what’s been happening in places like Selma…The organized civil rights movement, the freedom struggle, reaches a peak in 1963, with the March on Washington, in 1964 with passage of the Civil Rights Act, and then in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After 1965, civil rights begins to fade as a national issue for most white Americans, for a variety of reasons. The Vietnam War becomes an enormous distraction of energy and resources, the Civil Rights movement loses a number of its most effective leaders –  obviously the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, that has a tremendous effect as well. The Civil Rights movement itself begins to fragment and splinter; some African-Americans decide that they no longer want to pursue integration into white society as their objective; others begin to reject Dr. King’s emphasis on nonviolent civil disobedience. You have a rise of a new and younger generation of African-American leaders and so there’s some tension and fragmentation within the movement, and then in the 1970s and late 1980s that trend continues, and the organized civil rights movement diminishes, there’s less public attention to the issue, although naturally African-Americans remain very committed to the cause throughout the period and are still fundraising. To be fair, a great deal of progress is also made, and that removes some of the urgency, and going to the point of this interview I think part of the issue in Ferguson is that many white Americans aren’t aware of the many serious and real problems that still exist because this issue of race relations hasn’t been on the front pages or television screens except for periodic episodic explosions. But in general, I don’t think that many white Americans don’t spend a great deal of time considering how difficult it is, especially for poor, urban African-Americans who are isolated not only from white society but also from middle-class black society. And if I can just continue, one of the great successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is to create opportunities for middle-class Black professionals, many of whom have integrated successfully into society, moved into places and areas that were previously white-only, but they left behind a Black underclass that continues to struggle every day with economic oppression, police brutality – social problems.

SH: Do you see the death of Michael Brown and the way it’s been responded to as a potential watershed moment to bring race relations back into the national focus or do you think it could end up dying out?

MF: If I was an optimist, I would say that the death of Michael Brown might lead more Americans to question how the police operate and whether this war on drugs is worthwhile, whether it makes sense to pursue a prison policy of mass incarceration – the United States now has more people behind bars than any other country in the world, overwhelmingly these are poor people of color, there’s a tremendous discrimination built into our current policing system and I would hope people would take another look at it in the aftermath of Ferguson but I’m not especially optimistic.

“Many white Americans aren’t aware of the many serious and real problems that still exist because this issue of race relations hasn’t been on the front pages or television screens except for periodic episodic explosions.”

SH: Why do you think it’s become such a critical issue in ways that the deaths of Oscar Grant or Trayvon Martin in the past did not, or even some of the other deaths this summer (of Eric Garner, John Crawford and Ezell Ford) did not?

MF: It’s a terrific question. I think the Michael (Brown) death has attracted national attention largely because of the reaction of the police department in Ferguson. It’s quite interesting to note in New York City and in other places the police were much more proactive in reaching out to the community, they had better relations with the community, most large-city police departments are much better integrated now than in the past, they’re much more sophisticated in terms of community relations. We saw none of that in Ferguson. We saw a mainly white police force that was clearly not prepared to engage in community relations or in damage control in a reasonable manner.

SH: Having studied the 1960s, which also saw very aggressive police tactics against largely nonviolent demonstrators, not only in the South but also in Chicago in 1968 at the (Democratic) National Convention, what was your reaction when you saw the initial police response in Ferguson?

MF: I was surprised that in the 21st century, a police force was so unprepared to deal with a peaceful protest. On the other hand I saw the events in Ferguson as a very direct consequence of the 1960s in two ways. First of all, the urban riots of the 1960s caused police departments across the country to shift their focus from crime control to riot control, and really retrain and rethink how to deal with large crowd protests and disturbances. It is also in the 1960s that we first see the militarization of policing and that’s in response to the riots of the 1960s but it’s also in response to the Vietnam War, because in the 1960s and 70s, as today, the military was shipping large quantities of equipment that it was no longer using to police departments across the country. And so the police departments are changing their tactics, but they also have access to a whole range of weapons and equipment as a result of the militarization of policing.

SH: Are there any moments in the movements for racial justice, whether in the United States or elsewhere – in South Africa, for instance – that you see as comparable to Michael Brown’s death in a historical perspective, or in terms of how the police and the public reacted?

MF: If you look at South Africa, there were police massacres that took place – Sharpesville, Soweto, other places like that. I do want to interject a note of caution here. The Michael Brown situation in Ferguson is a tragedy, but we’re talking about the death of one person. I don’t believe that the Ferguson police department has handled it well, I was as shocked and horrified by the images that we all saw of people wearing military uniforms and clearly having equipment that was inappropriate for the scene. At the end of the day, and perhaps this is a low bar, at the end of the day the police in Ferguson do have discipline, they do have control. One death is a tragedy, any death is a tragedy, but you can’t compare it to the killing of hundreds of people in South Africa or in other places by a police action.

“There will be another tragedy in the near future and public attention will shift to that tragedy and away from Ferguson, and the deep underlying problems in Ferguson that haven’t been addressed in the past 30 years aren’t likely to get addressed in the next year or two.”

SH: I’d read that some comparisons just in terms of the images and how they had their guns pointed, but other than what initially started it with the death of Michael Brown, the Ferguson police haven’t fired a shot.

MF: I would simply point out that I’m writing a book about the Harlem riot of 1964, which was the first major riot of the 1960s, and during the six days of the Harlem riot, officers of the New York Police Department fired thousands and thousands of warning shots. And it’s frankly a miracle that only one person was directly killed in New York City. By comparison, in Ferguson, the police have shown, I think, appropriate restraint in the use of firepower. Now perhaps they shouldn’t have displayed the firepower in the first place, and perhaps their response was somewhat overwhelming but they haven’t used those weapons, they’ve maintained fire discipline and command control and they’ve kept the tragedy from growing.

SH: Where do you think things will end up going from here? I know you said you weren’t very optimistic.

MF: As a pessimist, I believe that this incident will quickly be forgotten, I believe that it will be overshadowed by some other incident that captures people’s attention. I find that today, the world of new social media – people are quickly energized, but they equally quickly forget what has happened, move on to the next cause, the next issue…I hate to be cynical, but I feel quite confident that there will be another tragedy in the near future and public attention will shift to that tragedy and away from Ferguson, and the deep underlying problems in Ferguson that haven’t been addressed in the past 30 years aren’t likely to get addressed in the next year or two. Although I do hope that the police department in Ferguson will make more of an effort to integrate, to reflect the community it serves, and of course to take community relations more seriously.

SH: You mentioned social media. Could you talk about how social media has driven the way the America has looked at this case and even heard about it?

MF: The social media drives coverage of stories and interest in stories. It’s clear that CNN and other major news outlets had no idea how important events in Ferguson were until social media exploded. The conventional mainstream media sources have been cutting back in their coverage of stories that don’t fit a national profile and into that void social media has stepped. It’s a reflection, though, of how quickly the Twitterverse and social media can blow up a story but I think like a balloon those stories are easily inflated but then they also quite easily deflate as attention shifts somewhere else.

SH: Could you talk about how you think the media has covered the situation and how the police have responded to the media?

MF: I hate to generalize about the media because it’s not fair to paint with too broad of a brushstroke – some of the media have done a good job. I will say, as a historian, I’ve been disappointed and in some cases shocked by the lack of historic knowledge and perspective that reporters have displayed. I am thinking in particular of a reporter on (CNN) who speculated as to why the police department hadn’t used water cannons, fire hoses, on the demonstrators. This clearly is a reporter who has no memory of Birmingham or the demonstrations, or why police departments since the 1960s have been very careful when using either police dogs or water cannons on Black demonstrators or protestors…I’ve seen John Lewis interviewed on television several times about the Ferguson incident; I can only imagine what he thought of that comment on (CNN) suggesting that the police in Ferguson should have used water cannons.

SH: For one final question, could you talk about how – if you’re familiar with this – journalists have been treated by the police and is that something that surprised you?

MF: It’s surprising to me – it’s reflective of the lack of sophistication or preparation on the part of the Ferguson Police Department. Most big city police departments are now much more careful and sophisticated when it comes to treating reporters. In some respects what happened in Ferguson is extremely comparable to the 1960s when reporters were frequently harassed, beaten, mistreated by police officers when they attempted to cover stories. The most famous example comes in 1968, in August 1968, during the Democratic National Convention, when protesters and reporters are beaten on the streets of Chicago who don’t want what they’re doing covered or reported in the media.

Six vehicles had their tires punctured while parked outside the Bigelow-Reed House at 23 Williams Drive this weekend, and Public Safety (PS) is working to determine if this was part of a larger attack on vehicles throughout Delaware. “We just need to determine if it’s isolated to campus – and that’s going to be our investigation if that’s the case,” said Investigator Richard Morman. “If it’s much wider, wide range like it appears it is then we’ll collaborate with the Delaware Police on their investigation. Obviously if it happened all over the city it could just be a random act; if it happened just here on campus it could be isolated.” “We’re waiting to hear back whether this is a city wide issue,” said PS Director Robert Wood. According to the incident report, the first case was discovered around 2 p.m. on August 31, at which time five other cases were found by responding PS officers. The damage is believed to have occurred between 3:30 p.m. August 30 and 1:45 p.m. August 31. Morman said that while he initially thought that the tire puncturing was targeted, the reports of similar incidents around town led him away from that. “There was no commonality between them (the vehicles),” he said, offering the example that they didn’t all have stickers which would suggest the owners were members of the same fraternity. Public Safety hasn’t determined any possible suspects yet, according to Wood. “We can share that we don’t have any,” he said. Morman added that they don’t know if the perpetrator or perpetrators were University students or Delaware residents. “Hopefully that’s to be determined,” he said.