Group Event

I wanted to wait to write my blog this week so I could use it to reflect on the group project I did for this Philosophy of Race course. Tonight, my group hosted an open mic night named Silenced Voices which aimed to give students a platform to openly talk about race. We had a handful of poets go up and perform and then followed with a discussion.

I was really impressed with the turn out. There were a lot of different people who showed up and although the numbers weren't huge, getting 25+ students to come to an event the day before Thanksgiving break when  assignments are piling high is great. But I'm not writing this to go over the facts and figures of the event. And I'm not writing it to talk about the poems themselves. Although they were all amazing and touched on topics including welfare, the war on drugs, education systems, racial profiling, and racism as a whole, it was what the discussion concluded with that I thought was particularly powerful.

Ursinus is segregated. We may boast mildly impressive diversity statistics for a small, suburban liberal arts school, but what does that really mean? Is it really diverse if the blacks sit with the blacks and the whites with the whites and the Asians with the Asians? Diversity isn't a statistic, it's a word with broad meaning and should suggest an understanding and appreciation for different types of people. Unfortunately, as we came to decide in our discussion, that type of diversity is absent from this school for the most part.

So why do people group by race? Arguably, it's not that people group by skin color necessarily but rather by a shared common life experience and whether many realize it or not, life experience is often heavily affected by race from the day we are born. As a group, we began to question how we are to overcome such an obstacle and how we are to start forging an understanding between different types of people.

Statistics and events don't make people really get it. You can tell someone the facts and figures of racial injustice but does that make people understand? No. In this society of white supremacy someone's race affects not only their chances to get an education or a job, but also their internal understanding of what it means to live in this world. If we really want to overcome the obstacle of misunderstanding, we have to encourage understanding and empathy. But how do we do this?

At least in our discussion group tonight, we realized that the arts and especially something like poetry can do a lot to forge common bonds among different people. The emotion and true experience that something like art can convey goes much farther to solving the issue of racial misunderstanding than pure statistical data and historical events can. While I still think it's extremely important to be aware of structural and institutional racism as a means to remedying the segregated society we live in, we need to get to the core of things. Art perpetuates the experience of being human, which everyone can relate to regardless of the color of your skin or where you grew up or how society has affected you. Race is such a taboo topic, but it shouldn't be. And art provides people with a safe outlet to talk about the way they feel about race and also affect other people's views on race.