The Student Association celebrated its first People of Color Week and hosted events running from Monday through Friday.
Events included POC Olympics, PODER’s Kitchen event where members of the club served food in the Student Union lobby, a Black Student Union heritage trip which was ultimately rescheduled, Asian American Student Union’s “Tsunami” event and a POC talent show.
“Even though we are a part of POC Council, which primarily focuses on identity politics and social issues that we deal with every day, we are still people, we are still students, there's more to our attendees than just race,” POC Council Coordinator Devin Forde said.
This was the first time SA organized a POC Week and Forde said he had the idea in October, but it took until February to “finally get everything set.”
There were some challenges to the event, according to Forde.
“There were some things, some original ideas, that we had that we couldn't do,” Forde said. “A lot of people ended up deciding that they didn't want to be a part of it last minute or certain things just didn’t go the way that we wanted it to.”
Specifically, the AASU event on Thursday was supposed to feature Asian American entertainers Mike Bow and DANakaDAN. However, Forde said the entertainers’ manager had “not communicated” with them about the event, leaving SA to improvise an alternative event.
“We could no longer bring them due to time constraints. The alternative event, which was the “Tsunami” [party] was a lot more successful than we really thought it would be,” Forde said.
BSU’s heritage trip to the underground railroad also did not go as planned and will be postponed to a later date.
Kendra Harris, the treasurer for BSU said the event was postponed due to issues with the check BSU used toward the Underground Railroad sites.
“We had planned to have a bus of 42 students attend if they had filled out an RSVP form but the check to pay the UGRR wasn’t ready in time,” Harris said.
Despite the challenges, Forde said the week was a big success.
“Every single event had an amazing turnout, every single event. I really can't say for one event over the other because each one really had a special place for me,” Forde said.
Tanveen Vohra is a co-senior news editor and can be reached at Tanveen.Vohra@ubspectrum.com and on Twitter @TanveenUBSpec.
Tanveen Vohra is a former senior news editor and covered international relations and graduate student protests.
