Multicultural Center hosts five-event series on community inclusion conversations

This fall, the CSB+SJU Multicultural Center debuted their new series, Community Inclusion Conversations.

Throughout the five-event series, students learn and discuss different forms of discrimination against students from diverse backgrounds. The series consists of five total events throughout the semester. Two of them—Inclusion for Global Community and Responding to Bias Incidents—have already occurred on Sept. 13 and Sept. 27, respectively. Detailed further on the Multicultural Center’s webpage, the goal of these events is to “identify how individuals’ social identities inform campus interactions and impact campus climate.”

Although students are welcome to attend the events individually, they have an incentive to attend all five: a Community Inclusion Certificate that will be recognized and awarded at the end of this academic year. At the most recent event, “Responding to Bias Incidents,” students learned specific techniques to intervene in situations of bias by practicing with real life scenarios.

Fardusa Ahmed, a CSB senior who attended the event, said that it changed her idea of what responses to bias could look like. She expressed that oftentimes, responses to incidents are either right or wrong, causing people to attack others. Throughout the event, it was taught that there are more effective and less polarizing responses. The event overviewed what was referred to as the Five Steps—steps that can be easily applied to situations where bias is either experienced or seen, which were listed as follows: delay, direct action, distract, delegate and document.

These steps were then applied to different anonymous bias scenarios that happened on campus. Students during the event also had opportunities to talk about bias incidents they had personally experienced, which were defined as things that are motivated by someone’s protected class, i.e., race, nationality, gender, sexuality, disability or religion. Maddy Marquette and Gina Neumann, two CSB seniors who attended the event mentioned the exercise when speaking about the application of this event to the outside world.

They said that it’s unfortunate that incidents like that could happen on campus, but it doesn’t come as a shock and that students need to be prepared to deal with incidents if they happen. Although there is an incentive to attend all five events, many students in attendance expressed that they would want to attend all the events regardless of a reward. The last three events that will occur throughout the rest of the semester are titled Creating Safe Spaces, Everyday Allyship and Gender Awareness, which feature discussions of LGBTQ+ identities, how to act as an ally to others and gender constructions, among other topics.

“For a campus that has such an emphasis on building community, it would be nice to see more people come to these events,” Ahmed said. “It’s one thing to say that, you know, you’re someone to stand for [responding to bias] on campus, but another to understand there is room for improvement.”