Malcolm X House drew a crowd of approximately 500 students the evening of Friday, Sept. 19, as the Resource Center (RC) hosted campus community members for the Students of Color (SOC) BBQ.
This year, the event featured student performances, catered food, an ice cream truck, student organization tables, and other activities such as lawn games and face painting along High Street. An annual event for students of color and their peers, the SOC BBQ aims to build community and celebrate the campus’ racial and ethnic diversity.
“The main purpose of SOC BBQ is to provide a space for students of color to mingle and connect, browse products of student vendors, support peer performances and discover the plethora of resources available to you and people that are here at Wes to support,” student volunteer Amber Bretz ’27 wrote in an email to The Argus. “It is a time to meet new faces and see familiar ones.”
Affinity groups first organized the SOC BBQ in the late 1990s, but the RC has ran the event since 2018 due to student difficulties in planning over the summer, the RC informed The Argus.
“Since the RC was formed in 2017, our goal has been to support affinity organizations with their identity month programming,” Resource Center Director Demetrius Colvin said. “The SOC barbecue was a tradition that the RC picked up leadership on, as it’s a very difficult time for students to organize, since they’re not on campus and the event happens in the first month on campus: usually in the first three weeks.”
During planning, the RC contacted student vendors, found performers, catered from a multiethnic collection of restaurants, and set up for both outdoor and indoor activities, facilitation, and cleanup.
“We depend on volunteers,” Colvin said. “We get somewhere about 20 or so volunteers every year that help make the event possible. I only have so much student staff, so those volunteers really make the setup and feeding folks possible.”
The SOC BBQ’s location has changed annually since the RC began planning. While the barbecue returned this fall to the original location of Malcolm X House, it has been held in past years at other program houses, such as Ubuntu House and Triple A House. Plenty of space is necessary for the event, as there are usually between 300 and 400 attendees, and this year brought even more.
“This one was a memorable moment, because I think we had a little over 500 people at this one,” Colvin said. “So this is definitely a record-breaking one.”
Bretz noted that one of the cornerstones of the SOC BBQ is the student performances, which have varied from singing and dancing to spoken word.
“It builds community by mainly gathering to support those that are performing and making sure to be encouraging because students will often perform original works or have nerves,” Bretz wrote. “This can be a great opportunity for students of color to advertise a new creative piece or put themselves out there.”
One such performer was Hindi-Urdu Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Dhara Kanchan, who played the flute.
“It was my first performance,” Kanchan said. “I’ve never played the flute on stage before. I just used to practice it at home with my music teacher. But this was my first time, and it made me more confident to play in front of people in a different country where nobody knows you, and you just came two weeks ago.”
Attendees enjoyed the lively atmosphere and variety of activities.
“I always love SOC barbecue,” Ronald Ceesay ’27, who tabled for the Black Student Union, said. “This is one of my favorite ones yet. I like the food. I like trying different foods. It’s a lot of fun.”
Following this year’s SOC BBQ, the RC is looking for ways to sustain and improve upon its success.
“This was the first year that we had the SOC BBQ at the same time as the Student Involvement Fair, and [we] actually thought it was going to hurt our attendance, but it looks like it might have actually helped our attendance quite a bit,” Colvin said. “So there’s some possibility of continuing to pair with that.”
Colvin also looks to involve more students in the planning process in the future through a new committee.
“I’m always for getting more student input and collaboration,” Colvin said. “It’s been kind of me and my intern that [have] been working on it, and we bring different people in, but I think we’re going to turn it into a formal planning committee.”
Spencer Landers can be reached at sklanders@wesleyan.edu.
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