On Oct. 10, the Drew DSEM program had the pleasure of inviting speaker and poet Carlos Andrés Gómez to speak to the class of 2029. Gómez led the workshop “Toward a Culturally-Affirming & Inclusive Campus,” which covered topics such as social identity, intersectionality and interpersonal communications.
The workshop involved both participation from the students and anecdotes about Gómez’s personal experiences with the topics he spoke about. The overall goal of the workshop was stated by Gómez as, “[to] identify where your individual work lies and [to] leave with actionable tools and strategies to be more equitable, inclusive and available.”
Gómez is a Columbian American poet and author, born in New York City. He completed higher education at the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s degree in history, and later received a Master in Fine Arts from Wilson College.
Currently, he works as a motivational speaker visiting colleges and universities, but his past list of accomplishments is extremely long. Along with being a published author of his poetry collection “Fractures,” which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, he is a two-time International Poetry Slam Champion.
Throughout the workshop, some topics that were included were social identity, stereotypes, privilege, interpersonal relationships and microaggressions. Gómez began the conversation with the topic of social identity, where he presented a wheel of different social identities that everyone has such as age, race, nationality, religion, language, sexuality, gender identity, legal status, socioeconomic status and disability. He then asked students to share different examples of social identity, if they were comfortable, that they think of the most and the least.
In the same segment, ideas of stereotype and privilege were discussed, as Gómez asked the students to share personal experiences in which they’ve been stereotyped and how it affected them. Gómez used a metaphor to describe privilege, saying that the presence of privilege was like “a plane fighting against a head wind and having to work harder to get to a place,” and the absence of privilege was like “a plane gliding on a tailwind, not working as hard to get to that same place.”
In wrapping up this portion of the workshop, Gómez explained that social identities that are privileged and oppressed can exist at the same time. The main ideas behind this segment of the workshop were that students often relate to different identities, the concept that they could be both privileged or oppressed and how to be aware of these personal circumstances, which can also be applied to others.
The ideas of personal identity were then applied on a broader scale in the intersectionality and interpersonal portion of the workshop. Gómez stated, “social identities do not live in silos, they overlap in unique ways.” In this section, students were challenged to think about how their own biases can affect the experiences of social identities surrounding them, for example through unconscious bias.
Gómez explained here that unconscious bias is something that people pick up everywhere they go and it can affect their perceptions of other social identities. He explained that it could be as simple as something seen on a “billboard in the car” or even on social media.
This idea of unconscious bias was then tied in with the act of microaggressions and how they can affect the groups and environments that the students connect with others in. The main idea at the end of this segment was for students to be aware of how unconscious biases can lead to microaggressions and hostility in environments. To counteract these behaviors, Gómez encouraged students to attempt “micro inclusions,” which can be minor behaviors that include the social identities of others.
When asked for one final message for the Drew University student body in a short interview that followed the workshop, Gómez said, “I would just say take care of each other. I think of the South African concept of Ubuntu, ‘I am because you are,’ and how all of our well-being depends on each other.”
Overall, the topics covered in this workshop gave students some insight into how behaviors in social environments can affect others and provided solutions on how to create inclusivity within diverse environments.
Nadia Yusko is a first year who is majoring in psychology.
