Stories of student discrimination continue to surface as this spring’s diversity campaign heads into its second week.
Leadership in Education about Diversity, a student group on campus, will distribute flyers on an anti-Semitic incident in Harbin Hall next Tuesday. Last December, students drew several swastikas in Harbin during a fire alarm, LEAD president, Zoe Marks (COL ‘07) said.
“Basically I think it’s really hard to get the student body to care about these things and it’s hard to make a big enough impact,” Marks said. “I would like students who receive the flyers to read them.”
Students from GU Pride and other groups have chosen “flash mobs” as a means of raising awareness of continued bias on campus. For 10 minutes, student participants hand out flyers describing incidents of discrimination and then quickly dissipate, Linda Ichiyama (SFS ‘07), co-facilitator of OUTspoken, an LGBTQ peer support group, and diversity campaign organizer said.
“Flash mobs leave students asking questions,” Ichiyama said, explaining her motivation behind implementing the tactic.
The first flash mob occurred Monday night outside Leo O’Donovan Hall and highlighted incidents described in OUTspoken meetings.
Campaign organizer Ichiyama said the flash mobs have two purposes: to promote the online bias reporting system and increase awareness of bias.
The Bias-Related Incident Reporting System is an online resource where students can report acts of bias on campus, created in the spring of 2004 as part of a response to a racist e-mail received by the Black Student Association. The e-mail triggered student protests and concern about bias incidents, Director of the Center for Minority Education Affairs Dennis A. Williams, who currently runs the BRIRS said.
Students put their names on the reports, but they are able to leave perpetrators’ names anonymous.
According to Williams, the BRIRS has been successful in collecting data on bias incidents on campus, but he said that the first goal is to make people aware of the system. “You can’t address [bias-related incidents] until you collect data,” he said.
The incidents reported represent prevalent bias towards sexual orientation, race and religion, Williams said.
Marks said she believes the system is good in theory but has some problems.
“I don’t think the bias reporting system is widely understood or even known about in the student body. I believe that students who would feel the most victimized by bias-related incidents, who don’t have a support network like GU Pride or LEAD or BSA, are the least likely to know about the bias reporting system,” she said.
Williams said he thinks that bias-related incidents have been under-reported, though he noted that those reported are indicative of those that do not get reported.
“The flashmob is a more public display of things that do happen,” he said. “It’s a dramatization of the data, so that’s good.”
