In past years, Residence Hall Staff (RHS) trainees at Pomona College used finger-snapping to express their thoughts about group discussions.  This year, it was the finger-snapping that Resident Advisors (RAs) and sponsors were discussing.

During this year's RA-sponsor training, an old practice of snapping erupted in controversy as some RHS members came to think of the gesture as symbolically linked to issues like racial politics in America and as a commentary on RA-sponsor relations at Pomona. After three meetings about the issue and a month’s worth of reflection time, students are still struggling to explain what the debate over snapping was really about.

“This whole snapping thing almost unravelled the training,” said Ric Townes, Associate Dean of Students and Dean of Campus Life, who added that snapping had been consistently present at RHS training for several years. Townes oversees the Office of Campus Life (OCL), which hires RAs and chooses sponsors, who are Pomona sophomores that are assigned a group of freshmen to live with and mentor during the year. While sponsors serve a similar function to that of RAs, they do not enforce policy, which RAs do.

Niger Washington PO ’12, an RA in Smiley Hall, said that snapping is “mostly an RA thing” used to express agreement with a speaker during RHS training.

“Whenever someone says a statement that someone else feels particularly aligned with, then they snap,” Washington said. “It’s a subtle form of clapping. That’s basically all it is.”    

For some new RHS members, however, the effects of snapping were hardly subtle. 

“As sponsors, we didn’t know what the snapping was, and so we didn’t snap,” said Daniel Martin PO ’14, a sponsor in Harwood Court. “And so it became a very isolating thing where I felt that only one viewpoint was being expressed by the snapping, and so instead of doing the job of affirming that it said it was doing, it was really just alienating the rest of us.”

Martin said that he came to dislike snapping as early as the first day of training. Many students, however, developed strong opinions about the gesture later in the week, after a discussion of race that left some feeling inspired and others feeling attacked.

Professor April Mayes, an expert on Latin America who teaches history at Pomona, gave a presentation to RAs and sponsors in which she described her own experience as a student of color at Pomona and urged student leaders not to give up on “frustrating” conversations about race.

“I wanted to give them a set of tools so they could understand where their frustration was coming from, and then they could be the leaders that they are and shift the conversation,” Mayes said.

Frustration ran high in the aftermath of Mayes’s speech, as tension mounted between those who had greeted the speech with loud snapping and those who found this snapping offensive.

“April Mayes is a very passionate speaker, and when she talks she evokes a lot of responses,” said Thuy Ly PO '12, one of this year’s four head sponsors. “It’s not because of the race talk that the snapping became an issue but the snapping was there: louder and more apparent.” 

Justin Gutzwa PO ’14, a sponsor in Wig Hall, agreed that the snapping became especially abundant, and especially divisive, while Mayes was speaking.

“The majority of people whom I spoke with and I myself felt that [the] tension got the greatest during the race discussion,” Gutzwa said.  He added that some white students had interpreted the snapping during Mayes’s lecture as an effort by students of color to “rage against the oppressor.”

Head Sponsor Seanna Leath PO ’13, known to many as Cadé, said it was incorrect to assume “that it was only colored people snapping for what [Mayes] was saying.” In fact, she said, there were white students who snapped for Mayes and students of color who listened silently.

Meanwhile, Washington said that “some sponsors did snap” throughout training, even though the gesture has been associated primarily with RAs. 

Within RHS, it can be difficult to determine which trends are linked to race, which ones are correlated with job title, and which ones arise at random. This difficulty may be due in part to differences in racial composition of sponsors and RAs. Martin said that while both programs value diversity in their selection processes, RAs are much more likely to be students of color.

“[OCL] hires people who are minorities in the United States as RAs, primarily,” he said. “These people are more likely to be interested in issues of structural lack of privilege [and] therefore more likely to be part of what I think is the dominant way of viewing these issues at Pomona amongst the group that studies it, and that is very intense social constructionism and the belief that these social constructions are negative things.” 

He added, “I’m certainly not going to say that racial identity was not one of the factors that created tension, because it was.”

Some RHS members, however, said that they were still trying to understand how snapping and race came to be perceived as related issues. OCL held three meetings about snapping and its implications--two optional discussions and one required session--during training week, but sponsor Abeni Tinubu PO ’14 said that the issue was never resolved to her satisfaction. 

“I kind of felt frustrated with how everything ended,” Tinubu said. “I feel like we talked around the issue. No one really got to the issue as to why this has become a race talk so quickly.”

Tinubu said that she chose not to snap during training, not because she felt alienated but because she preferred to express agreement by talking to the speaker later on.

“I could understand some of the things [Mayes] was coming from, but that doesn’t necessarily mean just because I’m a person of color that I’m snapping at everything she’s saying, or snapping at all for that matter,” Tinubu said.

She also pointed out what she considered to be inappropriate actions by both anti-snapping and pro-snapping factions within RHS. 

Tinubu said that a group of RHS members who opposed snapping acted in a “hypocritical” way during one presentation by Townes shortly after the discussion of race. During the presentation, Townes said that snapping was a “trigger” for him and asked those who were snapping to stop. A large group of anti-snapping students responded with loud applause.

“I just thought it was disrespectful,” Tinubu said of the applause, which she described as an unfair action in which one form of expression was used to suppress another. Many of those who applauded later apologized.

Tinubu also said that there were scattered incidents of inappropriate snapping.

“I know that there were definitely instances in which snapping was used to shut someone down, which I wasn’t comfortable with,” she said, referring to a discussion on sexual misconduct during which some students snapped to express the view that another student had asked an ignorant and pointless question.

During the RHS meetings about snapping, many snappers and non-snappers explained their understanding of the issue, and some shared personal stories in an attempt to show where their viewpoints were coming from. Some RAs, for instance, said that they had learned the practice of snapping at home or at church during childhood, Gutzwa recalled.

Martin said that the meetings helped clear up misunderstandings “on a racial front,” but that they also raised some issues that were specific to RHS and still unresolved. During the mandatory meeting on snapping, he said, a group of RAs squared off against a group of sponsors on the question of whether sponsors should report their sponsees to an RA for alcohol policy violations. 

“Anything that was left from the racial conversation had been kind of transmogrified from a rift that was racial in nature to a rift between sponsors and RAs,” Martin said. “I think this is what we had really been fighting about all along.”

Head sponsor Alex Garver PO ’12 said that the meetings on snapping helped to build a group that can deal with disagreement. 

“Everyone has a different perspective, and if we come together and talk about it, there’s a lot of growth that can happen. And I think that happened successfully,” he said.

Mindy Hagan PO ’12, also a head sponsor, agreed with Garver but cautioned that there was still much to discuss. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily something that was altogether resolved as a whole,” she said. “Because it became these bigger issues, it was definitely the beginning of a conversation.”