Guest Column: For SBP, vote critically

It’s that time of year again — when we elect a student to lead our university and represent our interests before decision-makers across the campus and the state.

As students start hearing from candidates about their ideas, I encourage all of us to participate in the process by reading each candidate’s platform and attending debates.

But it is also critical to understand the way a candidate’s identities, which include but are not limited to race, gender and sexual orientation, will play a role in the election — because they will, even if we don’t realize it.

Prior to the onset of the 2014 campaign season, I knew that the fact that I was undocumented, queer and Latino would be brought to the public’s attention regardless of what I did. My status as an undocumented immigrant, in particular, raised some eyebrows around the state.

While I embraced my identities, some people saw this as self-promoting, an attempt at “making history” and pad my “political activist career.”

After the election was over, these conversations had me wondering about the identities of previous student body presidents. In the past 10 years, the University has elected only one student of color as student body president. Three of the last five presidents have been Morehead-Cain scholars, and in the past four consecutive elections, white Greek students have been elected.

The white, Greek voting bloc is one of the least publicly talked about yet most well-known elements of winning the election. A candidate who identifies and connects with this voting bloc has huge leverage because, although not everyone in this community votes the same way, they tends to gravitate toward the candidate who is from their community.

When such candidates run and get elected over and over again, their identity is reinforced as the norm. When one experience is seen as the norm, it creates an environment in which some candidates can exclusively focus on their platforms without having their identities questioned, while candidates who don’t meet this norm have to continually justify their reasons for running. It’s a double standard that requires candidates with historically and presently oppressed identities to unjustly mute and erase the barriers that marginalization has placed in their lives.

Why is it that some candidates have to talk more explicitly about their identities while others don’t have to acknowledge them at all?

Our society tells us that a combination of being heterosexual, white or male is not an issue of identity politics — that it’s the norm. This creates a false parallel in which we’re outraged when those who stray from the norm embrace their identities.