Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

Events throughout the week shed light on discrimination

Students can volunteer to help out with the Tunnel of Oppression

Hate Out Week, organized by the Sabatini Multicultural Resource Center, will include the Tunnel of Oppression.

By Brenna Hawley (Contact)

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

To raise awareness of discrimination against different groups, this week the Sabatini Multicultural Resource Center is sponsoring Hate Out Week.

Chastity Richmond, Waterloo, Iowa, graduate student, is coordinating the week to train students in social justice and diversity.

“Diversity needs to be continued and be something that is expressed every day,” Richmond said.

Precious Porras, program associate at the Multicultural Resource Center, is coordinating the Tunnel of Oppression, which will take place on Wednesday and Thursday nights. She said this was the seventh year for the tunnel, which takes students through a multimedia and sensory experience of different kinds of oppression as they walk through the Multicultural Resource Center.

“Things happen every day that people may not think is oppression,” Porras said. “This is a chance to show students the types of oppression that exist in the world.”

At the end of the tunnel, counselors will be available to speak with students about their experiences.

Porras said the program covered issues of racial discrimination, sexual orientation, body image and genocide. She said she was also considering integrating immigration into the experience.

She said that the tunnel would show clips from different movies, such as “Crash,” “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Higher Learning,” and that people going through the tunnel would also hear various racial slurs. She said volunteers would perform skits illustrating different kinds of oppression, such as one where a student asked his resident assistant for a new roommate because he thought his current roommate was gay.

Richmond said a new event this year was a tour of the Haskell/Baker Wetlands. She said the Multicultural Resource Center was trying to integrate going green into social justice.

“We are global individuals and we are assaulting our earth,” Richmond said.

She said there would be a cultural aspect to the tour because there are ancient Native American burial grounds in the wetlands. She said the center was not taking a stance on the current effort to build a road through the area.

Students who want to help with the Tunnel of Oppression can contact Porras at 785-864-4350.

— Edited by Patrick De Oliveira

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