UPDATED: City of Madison Co-Sponsors White Privilege Conference
UPDATE: Lucia Nunez, the head of the City of Madison’s Department of Civil Rights, told Media Trackers that the City of Madison spent $1,500 sponsoring the White Privilege Conference and has one staff member who is helping coordinate the event.
The City of Madison, the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, and the Madison Area Technical College are all co-sponsoring a White Privilege Conference to be held in Madison in March. All three entities receive taxpayer money.
Promotional material for the March 26 through March 29 event bills it as “a conference that examines challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offers solutions and team building strategies to work toward a more equitable world.”
While open to the public, organizers appear to particularly target students, educators and activists as potential attendees. The conference website, www.whiteprivilegeconference.com, features a selection of videos from previous meetings. In one video, a woman identifies herself as a teacher and says she can’t wait to get back into the classroom to encourage her students to think about white privilege and how it affects them.
Coincidentally, in March of 2013 education watchdog EAGnews.org uncovered materials on the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website encouraging teachers to have students wear a white wristband to remind them of white privilege. The discovery made national news before the Department eventually deleted the webpage.
There is no evidence that the DPI project was tied to the White Privilege Conference in anything but shared ideology.
The WPC is organized by the Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion, which is housed at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. This year’s event marks the fifteenth conference, and only once before has it been held in Wisconsin.
Organizers and backers of the event want to make it clear that the WPC is not designed to bash white people, according to a descriptive page on their website. “It is not a conference designed to attack, degrade or beat up on white folks,” and “[i]t is not a conference designed to rally white supremacist groups,” the site helpfully explains in order to prevent any misunderstanding.
It is unclear how much, if any, money the WPC will be getting from its three Wisconsin taxpayer-funded sponsors. An inquiry to the City of Madison went without a response at the time of this writing.
Attendance to the event is hardly cheap. Tickets for the full conference can run as high as $440 per person. Teachers can secure entrance for $230 in some instances and the most a student would have to pay for the full conference is $270.
Students and professionals seeking to use the conference for academic or continuing education credit can do so provided they register separately with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs prior to the White Privilege Conference.
Tags: City of Madison, Colorado, Education, Madison Area Technical College, Matrix Center, race, taxpayers, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, White Privilege, wisconsin