Today was the Community Day of Learning, which is in its second year. Posters were everywhere, and we’ve been getting emails about it for some time.

found in the canaday library elevator

The topic of today’s Community Day of Learning was class, while last year’s topic was race. As can be seen in these social issues, they so very often interact with each other, and do not exist in vacuums. In today’s sessions, the topic of race came up, and how it interacts with class, how student’s statuses as international students or first generation immigrants interact with their class, how their education affects their social mobility. All of these (in)visible topics that are present but unspoken were brought up today.

I will start by saying that, unfortunately, last semester’s Community Day of Learning was held on a Wednesday which is a day I usually devoted to my internship in the Philadelphia. So last year I was not able to attend. But today, I was really excited to be able to experience CDL and see what will be presented. I heard lots of good things last year from people who attended the sessions, and I was very much looking forward to attending them for myself.

It was a rainy cloudy, day today, and SJ18’s top was a wonderfully bright breathe of fresh air in this weather. The colors also matched the CDL posters so basically she is the most prepared person ever.

The first session I attended was in Park 243, in the Session II block of time.

It was an interactive workshop, and there was time after each activity to reflect and talk about we discussed as a smaller group, as well as thoughts in response to what other students said. It was a large discussion that kept moving in different and new directions. We did activities and then we came together and discussed them. Everyone in the group had such insights and interesting views that they shared. Most of the people in that room were people of color, and I think it made it a lot easier to speak about our personal experiences in that group, seeing as the people who were around us did mostly share the same experiences with colorism in their communities.

It was a unifying, disheartening shared experienced that most of us found, that in all of our societies, whether in Indian, Nigerian, Korean, Mexican, Italian, Kuwaiti societies, Whiteness was at the top, and was best and other colors were seen as lesser than. And it was like that in the United States as well, if you’ll read earlier novels, where girls were warned to stay inside, as it’s only the laborers and the lower class who had darker skin. Which is why a student mentioned how funny it was to her grandmother, that Americans actually try to achieve a tan.

Medoza Ameen ’16 and Esther Chiang ’14

It was interesting to see the dynamic of having domestic students, international students, graduate students and staff in the same room, having similar discussions, and voicing their thoughts and where they themselves are coming from. It made for a varied discussion where people from different backgrounds had a lot to build up on.

Following this session, I moved on to a more formal panel called Class in a Global Context in Carpenter B25.

This session, like the earlier session, started with people introducing themselves as well as saying why they were attending this session, what interested them in it, etc. B, a librarian in the college, and I first discussed what our own class backgrounds were, and what got us interested in attending this session. I said, as an international student, I was interested in what others had to say about class in their countries and how that affects their time at Bryn Mawr because I, and everyone, remain affected by our backgrounds and where we had our beginnings. B said that he had attended the last Community Day of Learning and, in speaking to international students during that event, regained an interest in learning more about their time at Bryn Mawr.

Each student spoke about their background, and their personal experiences with class in their background. Some people provided statistics and most people combined that with just speaking about their personal experiences, and personal stories, of them growing up in their countries.

It was also interested how connected the two sessions I attended ended up being. In AR’19’s presentation about growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, she talked about how the class structure in Trinidad and Tobago was influenced by color. In AK’18’s presentation about class in India, she mentioned the caste system, saying “its hard to talk about class in India without talking about caste”, a phrase that is almost a verbatim quote from another student in the Fair and Lovely session.

I am very glad I got to be present for the Community Day of Learning today. Discussion and awareness is the first step to dismantling the situations in our societies, but it is an important first step.