Caption: Patrisse Cullors pictured above.
By Soleil Doering ’24
Staff Writer
“Don’t just bring in speakers, make real change,” said Patrisse Cullors, this year’s keynote speaker for the College’s 11th annual Hortense Parker Celebration. Cullors visited Mount Holyoke to honor the legacy of Hortense Parker, the first Black student to graduate from Mount Holyoke in 1883. This celebration was started in 2009 by graduating seniors Ahyoung An and Camila Curtis-Contreras to raise awareness of the history, struggles and achievements of women of color at Mount Holyoke.
The Hortense Parker Celebration was conducted via webinar on Tuesday, Oct. 1, and was themed around “Revolutionary healing in a digital world.” It began with a land acknowledgment from Noham Ghost by Water about the erasure of Native heritage in the South Hadley area. The statement was not simply an acknowledgment but a call to action; they urged attendees to use the information they shared as fuel in change-making and educating others.
Next, Mount Holyoke Associate Professor and Chair of Gender Studies Riché Barnes moderated a conversation with Cullors. Barnes introduced Cullors as the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, founder of the organization Dignity and Power Now and author of the New York Times bestseller “When They Call You a Terrorist.”
Barnes, a Black feminist, award-winning author and the current president of the Black Anthropologists Association, asked Cullors how this new digital world has shaped the Black Lives Matter movement and her role as a leader.
“Quarantine knocked me off my feet,” Cullors said. “It totally reoriented me around the work we do. How do we continue to build out our movement? While our government feels disconnected from the real world, I am very proud and have hope in the people. I saw human beings at their best, people rallying around each other. COVID[-19] is not the enemy — it is capitalism and its inability to take care of the people.”
Cullors went on to discuss her experience as a Black woman who grew up in the generation that labeled Black children “super predators” and witnessed the “climb of investment into policing and the prison system.” She detailed how the continual neglect of communities of color by the U.S. government drove her to “call for divestment out of policing and a deep investment into Black communities” through the movement to defund the police.
Later, Cullors delved more deeply into the “journey to understanding your role” as a part of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Folks must see themselves as a permanent fixture within the movement,” she said. “It's not about when it's convenient to you. It means speaking up at the dinner table, changing your entire institution.”
The event ended with an open question session run by Sophia Marcellus ’21, chair of the Students of Color Committee. Bea Rodriguez ’24 asked, “Do you believe that it is possible to create significant change within our country in regard to a perception of wealth, race and privilege, without a real revolution?”
In response, Cullors said she believes the concept of revolution to be old-fashioned; the term has many different conflicting definitions. Cullors urged Rodriguez and others not to get wrapped up in semantics and to instead focus on the specifics of what is required for change: legal and institutional changes throughout the country.
“I wasn’t sure what place I had in this conversation,” Rodriguez said after the event. “I have privilege — a lot of it. I’m white-passing; I’m an immigrant; I’m Hispanic but that doesn’t really come up until I open my mouth. … Hearing her talk really made me feel like I had a place in this conversation. It was like a call to arms.”
“We have to be present in this movement; we have to stand up, for not just racism but for homophobia, transphobia, all of these dangerous ideologies,” Rodriguez continued. “I know what it’s like to stand up against homophobia, but now I see it can also be my place to stand against racism. Not to speak for Black people, but to at least provide the marginalized groups with a voice that they might not have.”
Trinity Rich ’24, a student who also attended the event, commented, “Tonight's event was life-giving to me. I liked [Cullors’] calling out Mount Holyoke as an institution. … As a first-year student who's been here for a little over a month, I’ve already experienced microaggressions and have firsthand seen the ways that Mount Holyoke needs to change.”
Rich continued, “It was really refreshing to hear someone with more experience call that out as well and say that this institution needs to make changes. I hope that the leadership at Mount Holyoke took notice of that and is now making changes.”
“This institution has to listen to their BIPOC students; there is always a lot of planning but I never see them asking for BIPOC students’ input,” Marcellus said. “Of course now it is more difficult because virtually it’s not as easy to collect students’ voices, but that should be the priority for every step that they take in terms of action.”