 All right, so I would like to introduce Whitney Archer. She holds a master's in arts in women, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as a master's of education in college student services administration with a specialization in identity, exploration, and development. That's a lot, isn't it? And she's not even done yet. She's working on her PhD now. So her graduate thesis research was on the experiences of transgender students attending women's colleges. Currently, she directs the Hattie Redmond Women and Gender Center at Oregon State University, where she is also pursuing a PhD in women, gender, and sexuality studies. So let's please give a warm welcome to Whitney Archer. Thank you, Steven. Good morning. How are folks doing? Yeah? Awesome. I'm exhausted. I drove up from Corvallis last night, and I have a one-year-old who didn't want to go back to bed when we arrived. But I'm so excited, despite being exhausted, to spend some time with you this morning. So I just want to thank the committee for having me. Thank you, Steven, for the introduction. And it's exciting to be a part of the great portfolio of programs that you all have put together for this week. So thank you. Welcome. Yeah, so a little bit of an overview to keep me honest of what we'll go over in our time together this morning. I want us to develop shared expectations while we may only share this space for an hour and a half this morning. I really want us to be in community with one another. And I hope that the people that are in this room with you, even as I leave, you continue to be in community with them. And as we develop some expectations that they can lay a foundation for continued work for solidarity and liberation that you're doing here on your campus and in the broader community. So we'll spend some time there as well as having some shared language for the frameworks that I hope to bring as we think around de-centering and de-whitening a queer experience and what it means to center cutie-pock experience when we're looking at work for liberation. And so we'll talk a little bit about critical whiteness and intersectionality. And then I want to spend some time actually thinking and dreaming with you all. So I have some sticky sheets and some markers. And I want us to break in groups where we'll actually get a chance to think together around how we can solve issues that are facing our communities and that impact us. So that's how we'll hang out together. Sound like a plan? Long for the ride? OK. So I want to start by pausing to think about whose land that we're on. So here on your campus, LGBTQIA week falls on a week that started with Indigenous Peoples Day, a reclaiming of a day that was celebrating colonization. There is a group called the US Department of Arts and Culture. It's not a real US department, but they're a group of dreamers and imaginers who are a people-powered organization thinking about, like, if we did have a Department of Arts and Culture, what it would be. And they've done a campaign around Native land that has centered Indigenous art. So this is one of the pieces from that. So just as resources for you to have, I encourage you to check out the USDAC. And just want to pause for the Duwamish and Puget Sound Salish people's lands who we're on as settlers. Perhaps there's Indigenous folks who are here in this room. Thank you for letting us be here as guests and be aware that we are here on occupied land. So a bit about me. I'm Whitney, as it was said. I use both they and she pronouns. This blue house here sits on the Oregon State University campus. It's the Hattie-Redmond Women and Gender Center. So I don't get the opportunity to come and spend a morning with you. That's where I spend my time. It's a center that's been on our campus since 1972. We just had a renaming to the Hattie-Redmond Women and Gender Center this year thanks to student activists who did protests on our campus to change building names. Our actual building was named Benton Annex for Thomas Benton, a Missouri senator who professed manifest destiny and encouraged folks to head west. The county that Corvallis is in is also named for Thomas Benton. But Benton Annex, Benton Hall, other buildings on our campus just went through a renaming process. And I think it's just important to think around the activist roots that ground our work. And sometimes in the college setting, we think a lot, right? And how do we feel? How do we actually put things on the ground into action? And I'm just inspired by student leaders and activists that I get the chance to spend time with in the Hattie-Redmond Women and Gender Center. And Hattie-Redmond is a black woman who was a suffragette working in Oregon in 1912. At that point, in the Oregon State Constitution, folks of color were not allowed to live in our state. So it was doing work really centering the complexity of identity. And I think it's an honor to have her name on our building. And it impacts the work that we do as we strive to be as identity conscious as possible. And I think also the legacies of racism being written into the state constitution of Oregon means the demographics. If I was talking at Oregon State right now would be very different. We're a predominantly white campus in a predominantly white state and a predominantly white town. So when I think about how white supremacy operates, how whiteness continues to be centered within what gets picked up in the media, I really strive to challenge the ways in which I swim in that water every day and as a white person being aware of the space that I'm taking up and what my role is to work with other white people around our work of dismantling white supremacy and seeing how we are hurt by that and building solidarity with colleagues of color. So that's a little bit of what I do at Oregon State. And then this is my family over here. It's my partner, Carrie, and my two kids, Holden and Dalton. So they were troopers, my young ones, who rode in the car last night. And they're getting some grandparent time right now. So they're pretty excited. I think they're getting lots of TV and sugary breakfast things. I just wanted to just be able to bring who I am to this space. And I hope as we have conversations that you feel like you can bring yourself to the conversations you have with your peers and what we build together today. So as I talk about safe space and brave space, what comes up for folks? This is where we get some audience participation. And I'll bring the mic so we can make sure people can be heard around the room. Things come up for folks with these two terms. To me, safe space, like nothing and no one could guarantee that it's going to be a safe space for me. Brave space, I see it as a space in we all are encouraged to step up and step back when we need to. Thank you. Anyone have something they'd like to add to that? A place where you're not judged. Can you say more about what that means to you? A place that you can be accepted for what you believe, how you act, what you portray without any regards to somebody like malicious intent against you. Something about maybe the intent of a space, right? And wanting to feel acceptance. So I have some language I want us to think about. So safe space stuff came up a lot in the 90s. I think there's still a lot of conversations about it. But late 90s, early 2000s, we began to see more that brave space is a critique of the idea of safe space. So as our first speaker offered that, it's hard to guarantee safety. Our world is unsafe for a lot of us in a lot of times. And there's an assertion that bravery is needed because learning involves not merely risk, but the pain of giving up a former condition in favor of new way of seeing and seeking things. That there's risk involved. And I think when safety gets synonymous with comfort, brave spaces aren't always comfortable spaces. So I invite you into discomfort with me that we can learn together. While I might be up here, I want to hopefully hold a container that we are co-learners. You all are brilliant and are bringing so much to our conversation today. So I just invite that as we go. Some expectations for a brave space. I might say like, hey, it's a brave space, right? But what does that actually mean? And developing some shared language beyond, we're going to take risks together and make it uncomfortable. And this is adapted from Adrian Marie Brown's Emergent Strategies, another resource. If you want to check it out, awesome read. We'll get to watch a video clip from her later. She invites us to engage tension and not indulge drama. Anyone want to offer how they interpret that? Thank you. I think you might be talking about like, approaching the elephant in the room, that thing that makes everyone comfortable or like makes them feel unsafe and talk it out, try to approach it from different perspectives instead of just making it something big, like not circus, but more like a spectacle, spectacle, making it something that you feel comfortable talking and breaking down those barriers. That's why I understand. So as tension arises, naming that and engaging that, I think sometimes that tension is, the impact is that we're gonna learn something, we may be challenged, we may be expanding our mind to think in new ways. So make space, take space. Put the picture in. So I would say make space is like, you're creating, I'll speak for myself. Like when I make space, I kind of am open to other folks' ideas, knowledge, experience, and I listened to understand. So I'm like making space for folks to engage with me. And when the taking space is me, also using that space also to speak my own truths and using my own voice and bringing in my ideas and I'm taking space for myself so that I can be heard. Thank you, yeah. So that we make space for voices and perspectives and we also, there's a time to claim that space and speak up, right? Use our voices. So trying to think of a less ableist, like step up, step back, if people have heard that in other spaces. So next is yes and both and. And this one for me is thinking beyond binary thinking. Holding the multiple truths. The person who just spoke said like, I'm gonna speak my truth. Someone else in this room could have a very different truth and those are both valid, right? So that we sit in that both and. That my experience doesn't cancel out someone else's experience, but that together as we hear those experiences, we have a more complex and nuanced understanding of the world, of the space we're sharing with folks and the problems we're seeking to solve. So value the process as much, if not more than you value the outcomes. Anyone wanna speak to that one? So I'll share, I would love to dismantle white supremacy in the next hour and a half. That'd be awesome. It's not gonna happen, right? So if we can be in the process with one another, like working towards that outcome, but knowing that we're gonna learn from the process, things that we learn from processing today we can take into our next processes. Assume the best intent and attend to the impact. Would someone offer an interpretation of that for me? Voice we haven't heard from yet? I think this would mean that people are all here to learn so that we need to, if someone is, knowledge is not where we want it to be, just assume that they are here to increase that and then the impact would be, I guess meeting people where they are. So like you said, we're not gonna dismantle white supremacy today, but what we do get done today, we should still value that. Thank you. Yeah, I would just think someone once shared with me like a bowling ball example, right? Like we're at the bowling alley and I could be ready, gonna get my strike and drop the ball on your foot, right? I didn't intend to do it, but your toe might be broken. I might also be really upset that I didn't get that strike and come and throw it down and do it on purpose, right? The intent didn't matter in that moment, either way you've been left with a broken toe and so it's my job to attend to that impact, that my actions, my words had in a moment. So self care and community care, pay attention to your bladder and pay attention to your neighbors. Someone wanna offer thoughts there? Well first of all, I really like this one. Pay attention to your bladder. I think it's just really focusing on your own needs in terms of how your body reacts to certain things. So beyond bladder, just being triggered, being aware of your senses and then also being aware of how your community reacts to information as well. Thank you. And I totally agree the body is way more than bladders, but I do think as we think around access and navigating campuses, do folks know are there gendered bathrooms here, gender inclusive restrooms? People know where those are at, can someone who knows campus better than me point those out because I think it's important to name where there maybe are barriers or where campuses have worked to break down those barriers so folks can use facilities. Well I think for this building, like if there's community members or folks who are here with us, anyone? Okay, so building one has gender inclusive restrooms but there's gendered restrooms here is what I'm hearing, right? Yeah, so there's limitations to spaces as we think about that. And then the last one is a text request for phone and computer usage. If things go well, Sarah and Thomas really worked with me and I think Poll Everywhere is gonna work so I'm gonna invite you to pull out your technology but I ask that as we're engaging with technology that it's in connection to the space we're building here today, not the Snapchat from someone who's off campus, something else that's going on. We also have lives outside of this. My phone's there, if my kids need me, I'm gonna go, right? But stepping out, knowing what that impact is on your community, thinking about that community and self-care piece. Are there questions about these as expectations for how we engage today? These things we can agree to with one another? And again, I'm hopeful that these can be a foundation of how we, and I'll be leaving soon that you all can continue to be with one another, right? Maybe you're in this room with folks that you see every day on campus. Maybe there's someone who's in this room you've never seen before. But now as you walk through the community, you walk through town as like, hey, we shared this foundation, right? We're working together. Think that solidarity and coalition is built in relationships. We have much more empathy for people as we get to know them. We hear their stories and we hear their truths. So now is the time for Poll Everywhere and we're gonna see if it works and if it doesn't, then we're gonna pass the mic around and bring our voices into the room in that way. So, ah, you should be able to, and it's popping up funny. Steven, do you have the number to text? It's, so if you pull out your phone and the two address, I'm gonna walk it up here, so. Huh? And the next slide has it. St. Thomas for the win. Community experience here. Yeah, perfect. Okay, so we're gonna skip how you're feeling and we're gonna jump right into the question of who comes to mind when you think of LGBTQIA leaders, activists, and change agents? So the way you'll respond is you will text, the two field will be the 37607 and what you'll put in the body of the text to join this is Whitney Archer minus the R200. And then we'll see if the ringing in works. If not, we'll pass the mic and go old school style. Getting some folks in there. Try again and just double check the numbers and letters. We have a few questions throughout our time together. So once you're into the survey, you'll be able to just keep responding. We'll wait a moment, see if it rings in. If not, again, we'll pass the mic. You can write your response of who comes to mind for you. Okay, I have Ellen, Harvey Milk. It's working. Again, thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Sarah, for your patience with getting the multiple computers to communicate. So things are getting larger as multiple people put it in, right? So likely more than one person has put Ellen and Harvey Milk as those get larger. Maybe give it another minute to see other contributions and then we'll reflect on what we see. So go ahead and talk with your neighbor or folks around you for a minute. What do you notice in the names that are reflected up there? Are there names that you don't know? Are you surprised by things? Are there similarities of identities? Identities that are missing? I'll let you chat with your neighbors for a minute and then we'll hear out to the large group from a few folks. Okay, let's hear from three folks on some reflections of the wordle that was created by y'all's contributions. Some of it's piecing together because first and last names, right? So gotta put our thinking caps on. Like to hear from three folks. You can say if there's someone that you wanna name that you put up there but also reflections on what you're noticing of the names that are up there and what was contributed by folks in the room. The first thing I noticed was that women greatly outnumber the men. I also thought that it was interesting how many people from popular culture are up there. The first name I thought of or I think of an activist was Emma Gonzalez from one of the Parkland survivors and who I think represents the future of where we need to go and activism in the LGBTQIA movement. Thank you. A couple more folks. Someone from this, how we got? Perfect. I was just thinking that majority of the people that's mentioned here is from North America and they don't really think of it in a global sense. So it's not that we don't know much more about them but I feel like it's much more US-based people than people that's outside of the US. Yeah, the US-centric lens that we're seeing emerge, right? And I think in starting with whose land we're on and the way in which colonization of these lands created ideas of queerness and identity in new ways, right? That erased, there was erasures to identities that existed, right? Is colonizers came and really put binary notions of gender and sexuality? You've all untold someone. What's going to, it was hard for me to think of like people that were like leaders or activists and change agents. Like I know more people on a personal level that identify as LGBT or QIA. Yeah, I'm more people in my circle than like. So those individual relationships, but I think how we reflect on like seeing those folks as leaders in our community as well, like what qualifies a leader, what qualifies a change agent and where change happens. So now that you all are in, we'll have another question. So what issues come to mind when you think of the LGBTQIA community? What come to mind? So as we get more contributions to our world, again I invite you to chat with folks next to you. One of the first contributions we had to our group when we thought of who leaders and icons was like, we saw a lot of pop culture things, right? There were names, maybe we affiliate with TV shows, activism on a national scale, right? Keeping in mind the US-centric lens that was offered as we thought around that list. So I want you to chat with folks around you, around like these issues, it's a pretty like large collection and are these the issues you're seeing when you turn on the news? Where are you getting information that is feeding this like more like brilliant complex, like nuanced understanding, right? In a moment we're gonna look at marriage equality movements, right, and I don't see that up there, right? But I think there's a lot that gets celebrated of crossing that off the list, we're done, right? So chat with your neighbors, and then I'm gonna invite your brilliance into the space. Chat it up. Give you about another 30 seconds to chat before we report out. Okay, let's hear from a couple folks. There's a part of the room we've not heard from yet. Love to get more voices. Between this group, okay, so understanding AIDS and the very first day, attribution theory is say if somebody's speeding down the highway at absurd speeds and you're doing the speed limit, you look at them and you have a label you wanna place on that person, but the label is actually due for your own biases. You know, there might actually be an emergency and I heard the Mrs. here talk about being judged, not openly speaking about what they feel because they're scared of exclusions, and it's kind of the same as attribution theory where you place this label on somebody that may or may not exist, but it's in your own definitional biasness that there has to be something wrong with them. But then when on the flip side of that coin, when you do it, in your own definitional mind, it's okay. Thank you for that. Does someone else have anything? So we heard not explicitly naming racism, right? That was an absence of what, so we reflect on this. So we can come back and look at this as we do our imagining, as we wrap up our time together, but I wanna move and talk a bit about whiteness. And I first wanna think, as a group, what comes to mind when you think of whiteness? So privilege and power getting larger. Okay, so go ahead and take a look at what we have up here. Again, seeing oppression, domination, supremacy, overthrown, mainstream, upper hand, conservative, control, alt-right, voice, default. I think the default one is powerful to me, right? Like when we don't name whiteness, it assumes a neutrality that does not exist, right? It needs to be inscribed and we think about systems of power. So try and take a mental picture of this, because I wanna see how it changes, if at all, when I ask you to reflect on what comes to mind when you think of white supremacy. So I invite you to talk to your neighbors. And this time, if you wanna turn in your seat, talk to someone different that you didn't talk to last time just to get a chance to engage. So I'm gonna flip back to the whiteness so folks can see that visually. Here's where things landed when you thought about whiteness. And here's where it went when we switched to thoughts around white supremacy. Reflect on that with your neighbors for a moment. There's been a request to switch, so I'll switch again. Whiteness, white supremacy. Okay, like to hear from a couple groups. Okay. The slide that you showed prior to this showed ultimate power. And this slide shows ultimate corruptness. And I think we're taught that ultimate power ultimately corrupts. And then we talk about a muteness that society keeps because of that. So themes of power versus corruption as one group. Is there anyone we've not heard from who asked something they wanna reflect with the larger group? Can we all hear learning together? Thank you. I just interpreted it as whiteness is power and white supremacy is abuse of that power. How that power is wielded and used and abused perhaps. Any other folks have a perspective that they'd like to bring in? Thank you. So I was thinking about the slide before this one. What is whiteness? I was thinking of access and how silence, that could have been on there on whiteness, on silence. Cause I feel like whiteness is benefiting off of that. That abuse and that power, like that white supremacy, like the default, the neutrality. Yeah, those thoughts were coming into mind. It was like the silence when it comes to, or the allyship when it comes to the non-allyship when it comes to this hate, this murder, Trump. Thank you. Anyone else? Thank you. Under white supremacy, with the responses that are there, you really see fear as the key component of its power. So like with murder and oppression, you just really see the fear coming out. So fear coming out more on this slide. So a couple slides to give some frameworks for us to think around critiques of, not critiquing the existence of these things, right, but how do we have a critical lens to how whiteness and white supremacy operationalize? Anyone read Andrea Smith's The Three Pillars of White Supremacy? Try and give a shout out for things that you can go back to cause we only have a limited time together. But on a large scale, what Andrea Smith offers is the pillars that are upholding a heteropatriarchal white supremacist society, right? So systems of logics. So in thinking around colonialism and genocide, right, that the upholding of white supremacy is built upon a rationalization to steal and occupy land and the genocide of peoples whose land we're on, talking around native people in the past and erasure. It's upheld by slavery and capitalism, right, as we think around a capitalistic system that is tethered intimately to slavery and how those work in tandem and how we see the continuation of slavery and capitalism coexisting when we look at the prison industrial complex, right? That again, these are things happening in the here and now that continue to uphold this. And war and orientalism pulls from Said's work, right, of looking at the Western world versus the Eastern world and the way Western imperialism to come out and conquer is like a more progressed way of life in the justification of war. So as we think about this with query issues, right, and like, where does that intersect with don't ask, don't tell and needing bodies for these wars, right? And the connections and back to genocide and colonizing places. And while these are like three big pillars, the work of Jones and O'Coon on white supremacy culture, I think give us some more digestible, palatable ways in which this shows up in the daily. So their work is around like, how does white supremacy culture show up every day? Like particularly in workplaces, right? So they give these 12 manifestations of that and I'm not gonna go into depth of each of these, but I think they show, I wanna talk about them because they show up in how queer movements have operationalized. What gets traction in the media, right? That this binary either or thinking, right? You're either with us or against us. Get on board. It's 2018 and you're still homophobic, right? These like really binary thinking. Individualism, I think we see that in the manifestations, both on the whiteness and white supremacy, right? That in whiteness, where I hold my whiteness, I get to be an individual. We're right, we're in my targeted identities and my queerness and others. I'm a member of a community, right? So these become individual battles versus collective battles. A sense of urgency, like we need to do this now without thinking about the consequences, right? We get to marriage equality, it's done, right? We didn't think about the next steps. There was like an urgency in that moment. Perfectionism, an idea of objectivity. It's all about process, faster movement, not thinking around who those processes are impacting. And so based off what you all have shared, I think that we're sensing your reasoning that some of this isn't like new concepts, right? To be thinking around the ways whiteness has been centered in queer movements. And so I wanna show a quick clip for the sake of time to get to the chance where we can do some dreaming together. But as we watch this clip and hear people talking around how marriage will never set us free, be thinking about how what they're saying is counter to these white supremacist messages that have been latent in marriage equality movements. Thomas for the win again. Hey, I'm married and I'm very much in love with the person that I married to and if I could have done it earlier, I would have been done it earlier, right? But to be clear, I feel like one of my personal opinions is that I'm like, I can love being married all day long. My marriage is not gonna liberate anybody, right? And so to me, I'm like, how we actually center same sex marriage was like the main sort of like LGBT win and pretending like that's gonna be the thing that liberates like people that are struggling in poverty or people who don't have healthcare or the like the only way to build a safety net is actually to do it only in like partnership and or only in a couple formation to me is like to me the fallacy of this whole thing. We're really in some ways taking entitlements out of the public sphere and putting them into the private sphere when we attach our ability to access benefits through marriage. So one of the consequences of the marriage strategy has been that domestic partnership policies are getting kind of dismantled. And that's pretty harmful because ultimately what we'd wanna see in a more progressive world is a situation where our access to benefits was never in relationship to any of the other relationships in our lives and that we can as individuals access a wide range of public entitlements regardless of our citizenship status, our marital status, our national status. We're really kind of in some ways narrowing access to public benefits by attaching them to any kind of relationship form. Really, we shouldn't even have a system where benefits are attached to your private union. Nobody should have to decide whether their taxes are gonna be lower or higher and whatnot based on whether they're partnered or not. I think no benefits actually should be attached to union. I don't think people should have to be in a partnership to get access to those benefits. We can look at the historical interventions of feminists and particularly feminists of color that have critiqued the institution of marriage because it's really about a system of distribution of wealth and if we really wanna create a form of collective liberation then we need to think about everyone and especially the most marginalized people and marriage of course benefits those that are the least marginalized. Sometimes we're told that there's incremental change going on and that we're just gonna start with people at the top. That's a common logic. It's like it's true that marriage doesn't resolve immigration problems if you don't have a partner with citizenship status and it's true that marriage doesn't resolve your healthcare problems if you don't have a partner with health benefits that you can share through marriage. But let's just, we're gonna solve this first. It's one step on the path. In general what we see in social movements is that there isn't a coming back for the more marginalized. When you start with the people who are at least marginalized inside the constituency the well-being does not trickle down. People don't come back for the folks who are left behind. In fact, the talking points used to win those things are often talking points that align with the same reasons that people at the bottom are at the bottom. So we justify that we have an immigration system that requires you to get married to immigrate or we justify that we have healthcare system that requires you to get married to have healthcare. And we don't have any solutions to that being developed. Instead we're just developing, getting a few people who have those things sort of into that status. And so I think what our movements have been saying forever is that we need to put the people who are vulnerable at the center have our analysis of a problem like the problem of healthcare access or the problem of immigration access put the people at the center who are most vulnerable to those dilemmas and then build solutions from there which are gonna be much deeper solutions and which inevitably will benefit all people. They will trickle up but trickle down is a fantasy that doesn't work. So I have another poll everywhere for you. What comes to mind when you hear intersectionality? We come to a close of our time. I just encourage you to thank the people around you for being in conversation, for dreaming with you, for learning with you. I wanna offer my gratitude for the opportunity to spend time with you this morning. I hope that the conversations that were started today don't end here but can be a launching off point for continued work, for solidarity and social change. If anyone does wanna keep in touch I have some business cards if you wanna follow up on anything. And if you have questions, you can come up and chat with me but I just wanna thank the planning committee, those of you who are here participating for the welcome and for all of you to come and engage. So y'all are brilliant, go change the world. We could do a better applause for her than that. Thank you Whitney.