Why I did not attend WAM! - Women, Action, and the Media

For the past two years, I’ve happily attended WAM!, a conference held just across the river from where I live and a space theoretically open to several things I love: women’s media and women’s action. Last year, I presented with two of my friends, Ivettza Sanchez and Melanie Morgan, and we had a small but attentive turnout to our panel about video on the web.

Originally, I’d actually applied to work for the conference in 2007 - not just as a volunteer, but to be paid to work as one of the part-time organizers. I didn’t get the job, which turned out to be a good deal for me - I got other work in a social service job with an excellent schedule. I mention this only as a disclaimer for what I’m about to say, in an attempt to be transparent about my connection with the conference and the people who run it. I want to be clear about the fact that what I’m saying is not vindictive, simply my personal experience and reasons for abandoning an experience I once loved, nothing more.

So, last year, despite being denied a job, I submitted a panel proposal, and my friends and I taught. We thought it would be an excellent time for all based on my attendee experience in 2006, and I wasn’t sore about the job. But from the jump, we were disappointed. We were all a little miffed by the lack of vegetarian food options (it is, in theory, a conference full of radical feminists, many of whom are vegetarian/vegan). We thought interludes like a party for a late (if not great) white writer seemed a little strange, if not assumptive that at least half of the attendees would know who Molly Ivins even was (several of my friends, in fact, did not, as they do not conflate a liberal agenda with radical politics). I didn’t attend many panels due to the repetition from the year before, mostly because I don’t need to hear the same vague stories about other women’s careers as freelance writers (never fully revealing how they do it - do they think we’re gonna steal their gigs?) or sex-positive bloggers explaining why they speak for me (which they do not). I even bit my tongue that one of the keynote speakers had been changed since conference registration and no actual notice was sent out.

But as a white person in a crew of friends and allies of color, we all began to notice something even more disturbing while at the conference: tokenism. Conference presenters had already been asked to explicitly name our ages, ethnicities, religious backgrounds, and other marginalizing qualities when applying to facilitate (the more marginalized you collectively were, the better your odds of receiving a panel). We weren’t all entirely comfortable with this, but we understood the motivation and accepted the organizers’ understanding of equal opportunity as different from ours. But it was unsettling, if not insulting, when one of our friends was asked to fill in on a panel at the last minute - just because she was a woman of color. She sat in a room with a crowd of white feminists she didn’t know, quiet because of her lack of expertise, and later asked us at dinner, “Why would they ask me to do such a demeaning thing? I’m not even qualified to speak about that panel’s topic. Did they just need a brown girl?”

After hearing one conference organizer loudly complaining about and berating another organizer in front of a lobby full of people, I knew my time with this conference was done. One year of bad experiences shouldn’t have been enough to drive me away, but it wasn’t just bad - it was unprofessional and disrespectful of what my allies and I stand for. This year, I heard they brought back that same canceled keynote, Helen Thomas, and while I probably would have enjoyed hearing her speak, I also don’t think it would have served a great purpose in my radical agenda. I stick with events like the AMC, where real community comes alive and grassroots projects take shape beyond large groups of privileged ladies patting each other on the back. I don’t need to personally represent at a Home Depot of conferences, where white people get together and proclaim to everyone else, “You can do it! We can help!” Thanks, but no thanks.