Ferris students opened dialogue on campus during the Multicultural Explosion event hosted by students of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) registered student organization.
Around 40 students participated in the event from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, in the Interdisciplinary Resource Center. Students were encouraged to sit with people they didn’t know to get perspectives outside of their circle of friends.
Dialogue questions started out with icebreakers such as asking students if they preferred the Rock or Quad cafeterias. The questions then started to dive into deeper issues of student life on campus.
“After the icebreakers, they go into more serious and deeper questions such as, ‘Are heterosexuals and homosexuals treated equally on campus?’” said Ferris respiratory therapy junior Shawndra Tucker and host of the evening’s event.
The other questions asked throughout the event included: Do stereotypes ever stop you from going out to events on campus? Do you ever feel like you can’t go to a certain part of campus? Why or why not?
“Most people said that stereotypes don’t stop them from going to an event,” Tucker said. “However, they do believe that names of groups, for example the NAACP, stop people from coming because they feel like most people don’t know the organization isn’t just for black people but it’s multicultural.”
Kayla Jordan, Ferris business marketing sophomore, said she wanted to see the questions raised during the event bring more awareness to the issue and possibly even help bring about solutions.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to get more people to come to an event, especially if they’re not familiar with the organization,” Jordan said. “We definitely try to get as many different kinds of people together as we can.”
“Some of the draw to attending events such as the Multicultural Explosion and joining groups on campus such as the NAACP is that students can gain experience in many different facets of their professional and personal lives,” Jordan said.
“Unity on campus does exist, and something NAACP likes to focus on is to get more people from different ethnic backgrounds and cultures to be unified because nowadays people feel like they have to categorize themselves with their race or just by the way they do things. We can all come together and be one,” Jordan said.
Tucker said she saw the evening’s event as a success because the discussions had been sparked among the participants, and now the work can begin to create a better environment on campus.