Jen Vincent, Campus Carrier staff writer

Eric Zuniga, deputy news editor

This week, the Office of Diversity and Belonging is hosting Berry’s seventh Solidarity Week, an annual student-led conference intended to educate students about social justice issues and foster inclusivity.

This Solidarity Week takes place as Berry has deepened its partnership with the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, having hosted King Center President Bernice King for a public conversation on Sept. 7. Solidarity Week committee members chose “Be Love,” a King Center motto, as this year’s theme. 

Haley Smith, chief diversity and belonging officer, said that many of this week’s events are focused on using the King Center’s philosophy of nonviolence to act on social issues.

“Be Love is the starting place before you really move into the discipline of nonviolence. It’s a movement of courageous acts to achieve justice,” Smith said. “Every breakout, every conversation [this] week will be rooted in that movement.”

In keeping with this theme, King Center instructors Vonnetta West and Elizabeth Rosner discussed the principles and steps of King’s nonviolent philosophy in Monday’s keynote discussion. In a breakout session on Wednesday, participants of different faiths shared how their religion practiced nonviolence. Other lectures during the week touched on topics including healthcare disparities, inclusive sexual health and the experiences of undocumented immigrants.

This year’s committee has also planned participatory events for students. An international potluck, a community tasting of foods from diverse cultures, took place on Wednesday. On Thursday, students will participate in an international fashion show celebrating the clothing styles of different cultures.

“Being able to connect with each other and to actually just have fun with each other and celebrate each other is a really critical part of the learning experience,” said Allie Herbert, senior and solidarity week co-chair.

According to Herbert, every lecture has been approved for Cultural Events (CE) credit to encourage students to attend this week’s events. The committee has also partnered with several groups on campus to increase student participation. As part of these efforts, Memorial Library held tabling sessions in which students were able to create artwork expressing their identity on Tuesday. The Academic Success Center also hosted a tabling session to introduce students to the King Center’s nonviolence principles.

“It shows that an event is important to students, so we applied for CE credits for all of our events to create more student involvement,” Herbert said. “The reason we partner with so many different organizations on campus is because students are involved in so many things and having a bunch of partnerships allows for students in those organizations to be involved.”

According to Smith, the Solidarity Week committee prioritizes historically overlooked issues when creating programming.

“What are the topics that we’re not discussing that we need to discuss,” Smith said. “It’s important to be honest, it’s important to talk about things that we have historically—we, meaning, not just Berry, but society in general—have avoided or been oblivious to.”

Michelle Haney, professor of psychology, is introducing a new program that will allow college-aged people with intellectual disabilities to attend Berry in a lecture on Thursday. In prior years, Haney thought that discussion of disabilities was often left out of conversations about diversity.

“I think I brought this up several years ago, perhaps when solidarity week was first started, that it would be nice if we had something involving disabilities in solidarity week, when you think about diversity and marginalized people that haven’t always been part of the conversation,” Haney said.

Haney has hosted events on disability and neurodivergence in past years, and said that Solidarity Week is often empowering for students whose voices often go unheard.

“Last year I sat on a panel where Berry students that had disabilities, and Dr. Conradsen and I were invited to be on that panel, talked about their experiences at Berry,” Haney said. “To be able to publicly share that was really empowering.”

Berry alumna Diamond Newsome (20c) started Solidarity Week with four other students in 2017, in response to deadly white supremacist protests that year against the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Va. The event grew in subsequent years while remaining student-led, with Newsome establishing a committee in 2019 to coordinate events with different groups on campus.

Tensions over diversity on campus came to a head in Fall 2020, when a Residence Life area coordinator posted comments critical of the Black Lives Matter movement on his Instagram account. A group of students organized protests during Mountain Day, demanding the hiring of a Chief Diversity Officer and updated hate speech policies from Berry administration.

Smith, who had just been hired as the head of the Gate of Opportunity scholarship program at that time, said that the protests helped bring about Berry’s recent commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“I think 2020 was a reckoning for many organizations, including Berry College, that we have got to have these conversations, and we’ve got to figure out how to do them well,” Smith said. 

According to Smith, Berry’s partnership with the King Center stems from the challenges faced that year. While the King Center has partnered with historically Black colleges and universities before, Berry is one of the first predominantly white institutions (PWI) that the Center has collaborated with. 

“At that point, we just asked the question, would it make sense to have a conversation with people who have these conversations all the time and do it well,” Smith said. “We are, right now, in a unique position to be partnering with the King Center in helping them build how they want to partner with colleges, specifically PWIs.”

Over 200 Berry faculty and staff took the King Center’s NonViolence365 training over the summer. Smith hosted a discussion with these employees about how to implement nonviolence in the workplace and classroom on Tuesday. She views Berry’s support of these efforts as a sign of progress.

“I think that Berry has made a lot of great strides to do that and we’re continuing on that,” Smith said. “The college establishing the office of diversity and belonging, having a chief diversity officer, growing the support and the influence that these conversations have — I think we’re in a much different place than we were in 2020.”

Smith added that Solidarity Week is only a beginning step in fostering a more equitable and inclusive culture on campus. 

“I think it’s a great primer for the rest of the year — if we can listen and understand this week, we can do that the rest of the year,” Smith said.