This week, campus multi-cultural groups showed that they were about more than the song and dance that defines popular shows like Diwali, Black Anthology, Lunar New Year, and Carnival. Tonight concludes Washington University’s first-ever Diversity Week, the largest intercultural collaboration at the University to date.
Diversity Week featured nightly programs planned by a team of leaders from the Association of Black Students (ABS), the Association of Latin American Students (ALAS), Ashoka, Jewish Student Union (JSU), the Chinese Student Association (CSA) and the Social Justice Center.
“When people go to these cultural [performance] events, some people might think that they’ve gotten their cultural fill,” said senior Raumesh Akbari, president of ABS. “That’s not true. There are other issues beyond the show.And the point of a week of events is to show how these things effect all of us and bring people together over common issues.”
Diversity Week, although only five days long, has been a long time in the making. Several years ago, members of campus multi-cultural groups met regularly for Diversity Roundtable discussions, which were run by the Office of Student Activities (OSA). When attendance at these meetings began to fall off, the OSA discontinued them.
The Roundtable discussions were revived last October after an event during Campus Week of Dialogue. “Are We All Song and Dance?”, a discussion about the depolarization of the multicultural groups at the University, prompted those who attended to revive the collaboration of the Roundtable Discussions.
From these renewed discussions came the idea for a Diversity Week during which all events would be planned by various multicultural groups.
“Traditionally what happens is that a lot of groups of people, depending on their background and their commonalities, tend to stick together,” said Marci Colb, coordinator for student involvement for the OSA. “I’ve heard from a lot of Wash. U. people that what they really want is for the groups to start intermingling. Whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing can be debated and discussed…But I think Diversity Week is aiming to address some of those issues of how can we work better together, what causes are the same, what can we all work towards.”
Diversity Week began with “Cultural Labeling,” an event in which participants were literally labeled with signs bearing races, sexual orientations, and socio-economic statuses.
“[The event] showed that students have labels that we use to identify ourselves and other people,” said junior Jeri Ni, president of CSA. “And it was good to actively make people realize that we do that sort of thing.”
Other events included a Voters’ Rights seminar, a discussion of language and education, and a forum on religion and sexuality.
Tonight, Stir-Friday Night, a Chinese and Korean improvisational comedy group, will perform at the Gargoyle to raise money for Relay for Life. When Student Union was unable to grant enough funds for the event, the other groups involved in Diversity Week helped CSA cover the cost.
“A whole week of discussion might have been a little monotonous,” said Ni. “Not everyone is the kind of person to go to discussions.Everyone seemed to like the idea [of having a comedy group] to tie up the week with something lighter and tie together issues discussed throughout the week.”
The first Diversity Week seems to have been effective so far for those who have attended the events, said Colb. In the future, attracting attendees outside of the cultural groups who planned them will be a priority.
“A lot of the people who go are people who are already in the cultural groups,” said Colb. “I would like there to be more outreach, too, where students, while they’re not going to the individual meetings for the multicultural groups, will go to Diversity Week programs so that knowledge is spreading to people who wouldn’t traditionally be in on the discussion.”
Diversity Week had its desired effect on Ni.
“I’ve never worked with some of these groups before this year,” said Ni. “I’ve gotten to know more of these people. I’ve made new friends, and I see more similarities than differences than I did before. And I see potential for future collaboration, so hopefully this will be something that will be part of something bigger in the future.”
Diversity Week also helped students who are usually busy planning their own groups’ events to branch out, said Akbari.
“I did learn that sometimes we get preoccupied with our own groups,” said Akbari. “Sometimes we forget that other groups are dealing with the same issues. So [Diversity Week] was all about getting together to plan quality programming for campus that applies to everyone regardless of race and ethnicity.”