Two weeks ago I attended a generous dinner party at President Bennet’s house, an event intended to celebrate and honor the Wesleyan Service Career Fellows – students on financial aid who have been awarded a loan forgiveness gift due to their commitment to public service. The intent of the fellowship is to ease part of the heavy financial burden that students on financial aid have acquired so that they may more freely pursue a career in public interest work. Many, if not all of the fellows, are focused on issues aimed at actively uprooting/confronting severe inequalities in society, such as education reform, prison reform, housing discrimination, women’s rights, queer issues, and combating institutionalized racism. As one of the lucky few to be awarded this gift, amidst a graduating class of many hard working students dedicated to public service, I’d like to notify the Wesleyan community about how this dinner party at the president’s house illuminated Bennet’s lack of awareness and alarming disregard for the discursive and embodied power dynamics of that catch phrase we all know so well – rich heterosexual white male privilege.
After the meal, President Bennet and his son, Michael Bennet, gave speeches about their multi-faceted careers in “service work,” intended as informative inspiration for the fellows. Their incorrect assumptions of shared experience with the fellows (past, present, and well into the near future), displayed an inexcusably unaware and inappropriate flaunting of their privileges.
Within each man’s narrative was the same story told over and over, in which they were mysteriously given jobs in powerful positions without having exhibited prior hard work, dedicated passion, or, most importantly, required experience and credentials. These stories were told as if they were innocently funny. Noted jobs and positions include: enrollment in Yale Law school (with notably low GPA and LSAT scores), managing director of an investment company that used oil profits to consolidate and manage Regal Cinemas, counsel to the Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration (Michael Bennet), assistant to U.S. ambassador to India, staff director of the Senate Budget Committee, president of National Public Radio (with no experience in radio at all), and head of the agency for International Development (Doug Bennet).
Through humor we were supposed to identify with the Bennets’ experiences, and their stories were intended to inspire us in our pursuit of public service careers. Repeatedly the Bennets attempted to invoke an elite “we,” unreflexively assuming it was shared. This displayed a disturbing lack of awareness of difference, itself highly contingent upon membership to their elite “we.”
I am not suggesting that the Bennets fulfilled their job responsibilities poorly, or that they are unintelligent, or that they have never participated in honorable service work. Instead, I am highlighting their blatant insensitivity and denial of the systems and methods whereby those who are not white, male, heterosexual, and wealthy, are marginalized and often met with resistance in a world that is dominated by rich white heterosexual men, regardless of how hard they work.
They showed no awareness to the fact that many students in the room can work hard, challenge themselves, even enjoy the privileges of a Wesleyan education, and still not get even one of those jobs that was entirely un-mysteriously dropped into the Bennets’ laps. Furthermore, by assuming that their experiences would be applicable to our lives, the Bennets confirmed their silencing and rendering invisible of the vast differences that existed in the room.
As Wesleyan looks to the future, we must insist on not reproducing what I saw in the Bennetts’ dining room. As Wesleyan is in the search process for a new President, we must insist on someone who does not find it humorous or endearing that the dynamics of power and privilege keep some down while dropping administrative and presidential positions in the laps of those with little or no experience and dedication. We must insist on a new president who acknowledges that the Wesleyan student body in its totality does not share the assumed privileges and ease in life, and who does not silence the fact that our narratives, ideals, and goals are not theirs.
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