A full house for Pam McClain’s talk on racism and intersectionality

By Noah Brasseur

UNIVERSITY CENTER – Pam Ross McClain, who has a doctorate, gave a speech tackling the topics of racism and intersectionality, among other adjacent topics, on Feb. 15. 

McClain is Delta’s first Chief Officer of Culture, Belonging and Community Building. She gave the talk to a crowded classroom filled with other staff, professors, and students. Additional chairs bad to be brought in to seat the amount of people who showed up.  

She used her own life story and experiences to explore how racism and being a woman has affected her, as well as provided anecdotes and tales to bolster her theme. 

The cross between these two groups is known as “intersectionality”.

“None of us are just one identity,” McClain said.

The central crux of intersectionality is that no two people have the exact same factors in their lives. McClain, a Black woman, explained she could relate to both the problems felt by white women and Black men, but that the struggles of a Black woman provided their own set of challenges.

Additionally, certain dynamics can prove relative. She said she had a middle-class upbringing, and yet when she attended the University of Michigan she was called poor.

Intersectionality tends to promote a more unified approach to exploring how minorities are treated in the United States. 

“Oppression is just oppression,” said McClain.

She also explored how racism has shaped her life, referencing the works of William Cross, a psychologist who developed a framework for how a growing Black child came to understand their identity in the world. 

Cross’s work, McClain said, relied on the concept of “double consciousness”, as established by W. E. B. DuBois. That term essentially describes the disconnect between an individual who knows their own self worth and the messaging of the wider world that is calling minorities second-class or inferior to the majority.

Cross expanded on this, highlighting five stages of development where a Black individual learns to grapple with these conflicting messages. McClain went through each stage and told a story to go along with it.

For example, the first stage is about first absorbing a dominant majority message. 

She shared a story from her childhood in Spain. When she started attending a school, the other children were not used to seeing such a dark-skinned individual. As a result, they started calling her “chocolate.”

“I like chocolate,” said McClain.” “But somehow when people are calling you chocolate, it becomes this weapon.”

She shared she would go home crying, and it affected her performance in school.

“Before then, I had never really thought about myself as being Black,” she said. “That was the first time I really recognized I was different from other people.”

After, she discussed the ten lenses through which people viewed life, some more harmful than others, and some more problematic than others.

For example, some people believe the world to be a meritocracy, meaning those who are best suited for a job, or the most skilled, will rise the highest in society.

However, McClain explained, certain groups tend to underperform if they aren’t in a majority, meaning the current society is not a true meritocracy.  

She provided an example of this by sharing an experiment. Two groups were asked to rank a professor’s speech. The professor gave the same speech to both, with one exception-to the first group, he mentioned having a wife. To the second, he mentioned having a partner.

The second group ranked the professor lower than the first.

McClain’s speech was met with applause from all those who attended. 

For those interested in learning more about Black history, consider listening to Delta College’s Historia podcast.