Ever since her high school days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Katie “Peeps” Pieper ’03 has known what she wanted to do with her life.
“I want to devote my life to educating the white community about race relations,” said Pieper.
During her years at Grinnell, Pieper has been involved in activities that “run the gamut,” she said, including YGB, flute, banjo, softball, rugby, Campus Democrats, DIVCO, various committees, and SGA. She even worked for a summer in Taiwan, where she taught English to children.
“They were all avenues to work with people,” explained Pieper.
Pieper reflected back on her time here and remembered one year of DIVCO where every person on the committed was a different race. Differing ethnicities, sexualities, and classes were represented as well. Pieper called the experience “electric.”
“We proved that positive interaction between [different people] could work,” she said.
Looking for further proof, Pieper spent last semester at Spelman College in Atlanta where she was able to live with all black women. Spelman offered Pieper opportunities that were not available at Grinnell. Not only did Spelman offer classes that Grinnell doesn’t, but, Pieper explained, Spelman gave her the opportunity to make contacts with what she said would be the future black female leaders of the United States.
Spelman also offered Pieper the chance to “be a minority in America” and helped her learn more about herself. While some said that Pieper had a lot of courage for going to Spelman, Pieper didn’t see it as courage. She felt like it was something she had to do.
“Although I understand it can be considered interesting that I attended an historically black college, and I did learn a lot about the power of my perception of others and how others may perceive me,” Pieper said, “I think focusing on my particular experience acts to take away from more important stories, such as, how do minorities adjust to being in Grinnell?”
Pieper also ran for SGA president two years in a row. It was, she said, a learning experience in ways she hadn’t anticipated. Her gender, she recalled, turned out to be a bigger issue, particularly in the second election, than she had expected.
“There have been times at Grinnell that women have made me feel personally empowered by my gender; times that men on campus have made me feel no more than the body of a woman; and times that men and women on this campus have re-enacted the same historical struggles between men and women throughout American history, with similar tactics, similar power dynamics, and similar disagreements over possible resolutions,” she said. “I experienced this through student government ... I have faced gender discrimination.”
“I have learned from my experiences at Grinnell, and it has only made me more equipped to maneuver myself as a gendered individual in the politics of power,” Pieper said.
Although she wasn’t elected, Pieper said she has no regrets. “I think I was meant to come to Grinnell and I was meant to go to Spelman,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have gone if I’d won the election either time.”
After graduation Pieper will go to Colorado to work with people on a dude ranch. She will also be traveling in Europe with some friends, and work with the AFL-CIO.
Eventually she plans to go to law school, but for now she wants to “do stuff instead of just reading about doing stuff.”
—Leslie Boyadjian