Students Connect at Annual Conference on Racism

For three days, students from a predominantly white college in Wisconsin moved in with students from predominantly African-American Fisk University and held an intense series of talks on racism.

The experience was sometimes uncomfortable, the students said, but as their time together came to a close here yesterday, the students said they found more similarities than differences in each other. They said it helped them see their own racial beliefs more clearly.

“This forced us to deal with the prejudices we all have,” said Jhamerra Smith, a Fisk student who participated in the annual spring conference on race relations. “It forced us to interact and deal with each other’s conflicting ideas. A lot of people think racism is one sided, but it goes in both directions.”

For 12 years, students from Fisk and Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., have been sharing dorm rooms and discussing race relations, alternating between campuses every year

Among the topics discussed this year were health disparities among AfricanAmericans, the environmental hazards of being poor, images of African-Americans in the media and the effect of racism on the American psyche.

“White privilege is something a lot of educated people deny or don’t want to confront, but it’s still there,” said Mauro Sacchi, a 2001 graduate of Ripon College. “But we can do a better job of confronting these attitudes and accept each other’s differences just by interacting.”

But Raquel Gonzalez of Ripon College said she came to Fisk looking for similarities, not differences.

“We really found out how alike we are,” she said. “We’re all just human beings trying to have a better life.”

Jeannine Hill of Fisk said most barriers that prevent people of different races from seeing their similarities are self-imposed.

“People isolate themselves so they don’t have to confront race, and if you’re a white person, you really don’t have to confront racism,” Hill said. “But we found out we’re not all that different and there is a lot of common ground.”

Hazel Joyner-Smith, community outreach coordinator for Fisk’s Race Relations Institute, one of the event sponsors, said that the colleges and the students needed to be as creative as possible to keep their dialogues about race going.

“We’re keenly aware that what used to take place in the ’60s and ’70s is not the only thing we can do on this journey we’re all taking,” she said. “We need as much freedom as possible to be expressive in our inner-circle dialogues about race.” r

This story was written by Holly Edwards, a staff writer with the The Tennessean of Nashville, Tenn., and appeared in the newspaper’s March 21 edition. It is copyrighted by The Tennessean and reprinted with permission.