Community and coalition at this year’s BOOM!

Mount Holyoke College celebrated its ninth BOOM! (Building on our Momentum) Learning Symposium, an annual diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) learning conference that incorporates the voices and experiences of students, faculty, staff and alums. This year, more than 50 sessions, including in-person and recorded content, were available to the MHC community. The symposium was held as the Trump administration continued its agenda to eliminate DEI and accessibility initiatives in higher education.

Kijua Sanders-McMurtry, vice president of equity and inclusion at the College, dubbed this year’s symposium “a reciprocal space of learning.”

“These spaces can be incredible,” she said. “Spaces for healing often require connection. We are also focused on community with intentional structure, space to find one another and to be one with one another with practice and carefulness. … As Audre Lorde reminded us, it is in community that we find liberation.”

One of the symposium’s first plenary sessions was “The good fight: Advocating for the civil and human rights of LGBTQ+ people in the twenty-first century,” a discussion with President Danielle R. Holley and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Chase Strangio. Strangio became the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court when he was deputy director for transgender justice of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.

“It feels really good to be here in a space of exchange where we're celebrating curiosity at a time when we are witnessing efforts to make everything smaller and to punish curiosity and exploration,” Strangio said.

Strangio had never planned to become a lawyer and initially wanted to be a historian. President Holley, who also studied history as an undergraduate, praised their liberal arts educations. The conversation then shifted to Strangio’s arguments before the Supreme Court in “United States v. Skrmetti.”

After Tennessee banned gender-affirming care for minors, “the paradigm and cultural realities really shifted in 2023 and … about half the states in the country ultimately bann[ed] this medical care despite the consensus of the medical community in the United States that it is necessary, essential, safe and effective,” Strangio said. “So, we at the ACLU sued over Tennessee's law as well as many of the other laws that were passed in that year.”

Strangio expects a decision from the Supreme Court in June. “Ultimately, the Court's decision is going to be about whether or not it's constitutional for states to ban medical care in this way, but it's also going to set a lot of other presidential frameworks for how we think about equal protection more broadly,” he said.

After this discussion, attendees had the opportunity to attend various breakout sessions, such as “Know your LGBTQ+ rights With Chase Strangio,” “Diversifying the faculty and supporting the underrepresented faculty with Ansley Abraham,” “Foundations of social justice intragroup dialogue for white-identified students,” “Disability: advocacy, access and allyship,” “The makings of liberation: mutual aid, collaboration, storytelling and then some” and “Addressing Islamophobia: dispelling myths to break down barriers with Amer Ahmed,” to name just a few.

The afternoon’s plenary session was the second annual Critical Race and Political Economy Barbara Smith ’69 Lecture, a conversation with Angela Y. Davis. Davis, professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, is an activist, writer and lecturer whose work focuses on prisons, police, abolition and the related intersections of race, gender and class. The author of many books, her most recent includes “Abolition: politics, practices, promises, vol. 1.” Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped popularize the notion of the prison industrial complex, she now urges her audiences to think about the possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a twenty-first century abolitionist movement.

Before the talk commenced in a packed Chapin Auditorium, President Holley told the audience that Barbara Smith ’69 was in attendance and asked her to stand for the crowd to honor her. Davis smiled and said with deep satisfaction, “I don't think I would want to be any other place in the world at this moment.”

Davis discussed growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. “I learned a great deal about community. I learned about resistance even before I knew I was learning about resistance,” she said. Between 1947 and 1964, Birmingham was dubbed “Bombingham” due to the 50 dynamite explosions that were used against Black people (who were attempting to move into entirely white neighborhoods) as well as against anyone working toward racial desegregation.

“My first memories are of the sound of the dynamite,” Davis said. “It was the loudest sound I’ve ever heard, really, and it totally frightened me. I’ll never forget that. And that was one of the houses across the street.”

Davis stressed that community and coalition are the most important tools for activism. “So many things are attributed to me as an individual when there's really absolutely nothing that I've ever done that's significant that I've done by myself,” she said.

She advised students to remain steadfast as they try to change the world. “Oftentimes, what you are aware of and what you witness and what you wish to achieve [do] not resonate [at] the time, but [they] resonate later,” Davis said. “Even for the purpose of guaranteeing that we'll have the opportunity to resonate later, you have to keep doing the work even if it appears as if nothing is changing.”

There were three more plenary sessions that evening: a performance by internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker and actor ALOK; the annual Frances Perkins Monologues, which this year was a celebration of the forty-fifth anniversary of the Frances Perkins Scholars program with Rebecca Brenner Graham ’15; and the “AGOO! concert — a night of West African music and dance,” which was the culmination of the activities of the day.