People’s gender, race and ethnicity, sexual identity and socioeconomic level often determine how they will be treated and the opportunities they will have, a point made clear at the Diversity Dialogue held Saturday.
“That’s how people’s brains work,” said Deb Nielsen, gifted education coordinator with the San Juan Board of Cooperative Services. “We sort things – and people – into boxes.”
About 60 people attended the sixth annual event at the Durango Community Recreation Center.
The morning included an exercise where people stepped forward or back based on a series of questions. It vividly demonstrated the different experiences people have in our society.
Those who had parents who graduated from college, grew up in homes with libraries and where newspapers were read, stepped forward. Those who didn’t see anyone of their race or ethnicity as teachers, as police officers or government leaders or had not gotten a job or opportunity because of their race, gender or ethnicity, stepped back.
By the end of the exercise, those who had stepped the farthest forward – primarily, but not solely, Caucasian men – found themselves reaching a poster called the American Dream, while many others were across the room from that ideal.
“The American Dream is dead,” said Ron Garst, one of several members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango who attended. “It’s alive in places like Denmark, Sweden and Norway, where the bottom 20 percent of people socioeconomically have the best chance of moving up.”
One black man called his experiences the “American Nightmare,” another, an immigrant from Taiwan, believed the dream still resonates.
In her background, Fort Lewis College student Kate Suazo can claim ancestors who were among the first 100 Spanish families to settle in New Mexico and a mother who comes from more northern European heritage.
“I have light-colored skin and blue eyes, but my brother and sisters have darker skin and eyes and dark, curly hair,” she said. “I live in a different world than they do and have more opportunities than they do, and it’s not fair.”
Nancy Stoffer, coordinator of diversity programming and manager of Common Ground, told a story of two young women in a passionate embrace near the “fishbowl,” a computer lab with big windows in Reed Library.
“I realized no one was paying attention,” she said. “If I had done that in college with my girlfriend, it would have caused a scene. So we have come a long way as a society, but we have a long way to go.”
The dialogue was sponsored by the Durango Community Relations Commission and the Embracing Diversity Initiative in collaboration with the Durango High School Prejudice Elimination Action Team, Common Ground and El Centro de Muchos Colores at Fort Lewis College and the Healthy Communities Initiative.
Organizers lengthened the day this year, said Lauren Patterson, who works with Operation Healthy Communities and the Embracing Diversity Initiative, because they found in previous years they spent most of the morning awakening people to their own biases and experiences without coming up with any plans for what to do about it.
This year, they added information about how to speak up respectfully when someone says something that’s everyday bigotry, beginning by not calling it racism or bigotry, which just raises defensive walls.
“Appeal to their better instincts,” said Marsha Houston, chairwoman of the Communications Department at the University of Alabama, who is quoted in one of the handouts. “Remember that people are complex. What they say in one moment is not necessarily an indication of everything they think.”
Stereotypes can apply to places, too. Asked how Durango is perceived, the terms “oasis,” “very fit town” and “very diverse,” came up.
“People say we’re all skiers,” said Maureen Maliszewski, director of Thrive! Living Wage Coalition, “but I don’t ski. I’ve lived here for nine years, and I’m not going to start.”
Another example of a stereotype about Durango was the idea that everyone is going on 20-mile bike rides on bicycles worth more than most cars, when many people are riding second-hand bikes because they can’t afford cars.
One thing was understood by the attendees at the end of the Diversity Dialogue – human beings all see the world through their individual lens, formed by societal and family beliefs and colored by personal experiences.
“Our truths may not be truths for everyone,” said Shirena Trujillo Long, director of El Centro at FLC, “or they may not be the truth for anyone.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
Responses to jokes/slurs (PDF)
Cultural Competence Page 2 (PDF)
Cultural competence Page 1 (PDF)
