Remembering “The Tunnel of Oppression” (2000-2004)
Remembering a unique diversity education initiative of the past to reflect on how affect and embodiment shape an audience’s response to a call-to-action against systemic oppression
***Trigger Warning*** This entry contains several photos of The Tunnel of Oppression that depict racial and homophobic slurs being used performatively to educate audience members about systemic oppression. The photos are included at the bottom of the entry, so you can avoid them by stopping at the end of the written entry.
The Tunnel of Oppression was an experience created by the student organization Bridge Builders and advertised as a live tour with a small discussion group intended to educate students on the forms of abuse faced by marginalized groups in American society. Different iterations of the event were organized from the Spring of 2000 to the Spring of 2004.
In a Megaphone article from 2004, a member of Bridge Builders named Dana Sanders described the experience as a kind of “haunted house, which provides visceral experiences of how oppression impacts people on a daily basis.”
I can personally attest to the “visceral” nature of this experience, because I definitely felt something myself when I stumbled upon shocking pictures of The Tunnel of Oppression in the March 1, 2001 edition of the Megaphone, one of which depicted a student crouched in front of a wall with a multitude of racist slurs plastered behind her, and another that depicted a student holding a sign with a homophobic slur.
Members of Bridge Builders represented themselves as a peer-education organization that strived to promote diversity in a manner that sought to counter the longstanding characterization of campus as “the Southwestern bubble,” where the weekly routines of work, studying, and partying on campus obscured and insulated students from the social and political issues faced by “non-school society,” and where the demographics and dominant culture of Southwestern as a heteronormative and predominantly-white institution (PWI) marginalized anyone who did not “fit” in that bubble.
By affirming how the nature of oppression extends past the SU Bubble while also acknowledging the oppression faced by minority students at SU itself, the organization used their events to demonstrate the more drastic consequences of systemic oppression in a more practical manner than the standard books or papers or lectures on diversity education. Bridge Builders argued that a large portion of society is unaware of the social inequality faced by marginalized groups, and took it upon themselves to show people what that felt like.
This description led me back to one of the first questions I had upon my discovery of The Tunnel of Oppression: who was this experience for?
Referring back to the argument that a large portion of people in dominant culture are unaware of the social inequality faced by marginalized groups, I would argue that The Tunnel of Oppression was designed for individuals who were not marginalized for their race, nationality, or sexual orientation, which was the overwhelming majority of SU during that time.
Thinking about the conceptualization, construction, and actualization of The Tunnel, I was compelled to find out more about who did the labor for this experience. This led to my earlier outline of the Bridge Builder’s organization, and a discovery that the organization did consist of a diverse group of individuals despite no documented association with other affinity groups for minority identities on campus.
While I acknowledge the validity of these individuals choosing to represent their trauma with systemic injustice through The Tunnel of Oppression, I was conflicted with the new question of how it was perceived by its audience. Was the experience interpreted as a call-to-action against these issues, or an empty gesture with nothing more than shock value for those who have never had an embodied experience of marginalization?
As a queer, biracial person, I know I would struggle to reenact something like these examples of marginalization if I was unsure whether it would result in a tangible change in the mindset of its intended audience. While myself and other marginalized students have often learned about oppression and social justice through our own lived experiences, people in the majority are not going to feel that trauma in their bodies when they see those words. They might feel shame or guilt or anger, but since those words are not directed at them and do not reinforce the marginalization that queer people of color carry with them in their bodies everywhere they go, such an exercise seems ineffective at best, and maybe even harmful.
Maintaining my own perspective here, I would like to recognize how social and political activism for oppressed identity groups today is often characterized as people getting triggered by things that offend them and putting their energy towards the things themselves rather than the systems that created them. I think that everyone needs to feel a sense of discomfort when confronting the past and present manifestations of oppression, but if this discomfort cannot be harnessed and redirected towards identifiable change then it is not worth invoking. Moreover, having someone experience this as only an exercise might actually make them come away feeling as if they know something they could never really know the way marginalized people do.
Context matters, and embodiment matters. The affects and effects of this kind of diversity education experience depend very much on the embodiment of the people involved –as both instructors and students, producers and audiences. My visceral response to stumbling upon that picture of those slurs written on a wall wasn’t that much different from what I have felt throughout my life when I have encountered those words. And it wasn’t that much different from how I felt more recently when I heard that someone had written racist slurs on whiteboards in dorms or yelled them at current Southwestern students of color.
I see this conflict manifest through The Tunnel of Oppression as an experience conducted on the SU campus, a place with an eclectic mix of liberal and conservative ideals that both affirm and antagonize this notion of an SU Bubble. Reflecting on the history of this experience today, I recognize its attempt to teach students of the majority about minority issues through an eye-catching medium built to invoke a strong emotive response from its audience, while considering what my own emotive response suggests about how and why the ways people advocate towards equality over time changes.
