Stephanie Tate | Managing Editors
Minority students at NC State have kept the momentum from last month’s Student Government Racial Climate Town Hall by hosting a follow-up meeting where the panel members discussed the progress of their action items.
The meeting, led by Moriah Barrow, a senior studying communication, and Kamrie Risku, a sophomore studying political science, was open to the public and drew students from a variety of organizations.
Those action items included inclusivity training for all student organizations, diversity and inclusivity training for all incoming students through orientation, an honor court system that educates students who commit non-academic misconduct and electing an Asian director in Multicultural Student Affairs.
The meeting started with a recap of all of the action items. Students were then able to self select the action item that they were most interested in working on and help brainstorm how to bring those action items to fruition. After brainstorming, the groups were brought back to discuss their respective action items.
Those who brainstormed ideas on how to implement action item one, inclusivity training for all student organizations, came up with ideas such as requiring one diversity activity or event per semester and having an open forum for student organizations.
There were also suggestions of utilizing the Student Involvement Center more and working together to incorporate diversity and inclusivity trainings into their pre-existing org-specific trainings.
The second action item, inclusivity training for incoming students through orientation, was presented by Darryl Johnson, a junior studying mechanical engineering. One idea that was brought up included having diversity coordinators from each of the colleges present an interactive workshop on diversity and then having orientation leaders facilitate a conversation on diversity and its importance.
“We want the trainings to create a medium where students can have free space to discuss diversity,” said Johnson, “the issue is feasibility.”
Johnson said this is the sense that it will be nearly impossible to do separate trainings for over twenty orientation groups in one day. The solution: a video that could be played many times throughout orientation with ease. The orientation leaders would then facilitate a discussion with their group to make the video more potent.
The honor court system, action item three, was discussed by Kamrie Risku. Risku discussed the importance of implementing the education aspect of the court because punishment deters students from learning why their discriminatory acts were wrong.
Risku could not say much, as she was waiting on answers to her own questions until her meeting the following day with Student Conduct Director Paul Cousins.
However, she did note that this honor court would not be established in the interest of “worrying about feelings.” Creating discomfort in the students brought to honor court is somewhat of a goal for Risku.
“A minute of discomfort for that student is nothing in comparison to the discomfort felt by minority students everyday,” she said. “We are definitely in the business of making people uncomfortable.”
