By Ella White ‘22
Staff Writer
Mount Holyoke held its fifth annual BOOM! Conference, a collection of workshops and panels on racial justice, on Tuesday, March 23. The program focused on understanding bias in the distribution of land, resources and communities.
In the opening ceremony and throughout the events, the organizers emphasized the increase in violence toward Asian Americans since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — particularly with regard to the recent shooting in Atlanta, which left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian American.
The opening ceremony served as a vigil for the victims of the Atlanta shooting, including a reading of the victims’ names, a slideshow on the history of anti-Asian racism and Asian American activism and a reading by Visiting Lecturer in English Jerrine Tan.
“Honoring the lives of those killed in Atlanta as well as their families’ grief, saying their names, makes human and personal every life extinguished by white supremacy and senseless violence,” College President Sonya Stephens said during the opening address.
At odds with last year’s mostly asynchronous events, the majority of the events this year were held live via Zoom, though some were recorded to allow students to view them later.
Since it was virtual, BOOM! 2021 was more accessible. As Angelis Liriano ’22 noted in the opening remarks, the program welcomed many alumni to attend for the first time.
Throughout the day, event hosts repeated land acknowledgments, sometimes with variances due to the now widespread nature of the Mount Holyoke community.
Portions of BOOM! built on “The 1619 Project” — last year’s summer read — and stressed the importance of understanding race in America through a more holistic lens. A workshop led by Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis focused on dealing with trauma amid present circumstances. A presentation by the Mount Holyoke Archives detailed research into the first Indigenous students to attend Mount Holyoke, while a panel led by the Whitney Museum presented on the history of enslaved families in New Orleans.
Author Clint Smith featured as the keynote speaker. Smith discussed his upcoming nonfiction book, “How the Word is Passed,” in which he examines the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in locations across America. Smith said the book is “a reminder that statues are not just statues and symbols are not just symbols. The stories we tell shape the policies we create, and the policies we create impact people’s material conditions.”
Smith also spoke of his experience teaching at prisons, where he said he is learning and gaining more from those incarcerated than they are from him. “If I’m just sitting in the library at Harvard University reading Foucault, prison becomes an abstraction. I know [I] need to put myself in places where I am interfacing and spending time with the populations of people I’m seeking to work with,” Smith said.
The final event of the day was a panel on the impact and importance of mutual aid in communities. Not only are mutual aid organizations a way to protect the most vulnerable in a community, said panelist Prentis Hemphill ’04, but they are a way for the community to connect and grieve together, particularly in times like these.
“Some things that are necessary for us to feel in the moment actually can’t be felt alone or in one body,” Hemphill said. “We need those spaces where we come together.”