Students walking out of the MLK Assembly on Jan 29 may have found themselves pondering the questions theater troupe CLIMB opened and closed with in their performance of A Deeper Look.
The performance included several monologues, sketches and songs surrounding the questions of multiculturalism. A promotion for the show on the group’s web site asks, “Can we both embrace and disengage from our American history of prejudice and religious intolerance?”
The performance’s reception was generally positive. “Last year,” sophomore Jesus Vega said, “it was only one story, one point of view. This year, with a couple Latinas, it was a little more relatable for me. It was about oppression in general.”
The show was based primarily around true stories of racism and religious discrimination. Mixed in were sketches, representing hypothetical, historical, and personal anecdotes. In one sketch, a four-armed job interviewee and her potential employer shared their perspectives on racial profiling and accepting diversity. In another, an African-American performer described the teasing he suffered at the hands of his friends and family for “acting white” and having white friends.
Finally, another performer told a tragic story about the consequences her family suffered after her grandfather stood up to the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana during the early 20th Century.
A slide show during the performance presented a roll of racist proverbs directed, during different points in history, at Germans, Japanese, Catholics, Jews, and,Muslims.
IC took initiative to make post-assembly discussion, held Feb. 5, more intense than usual. The discussion’s facilitators met on Jan. 30 with Alison Frosch, Racial Justice Program Coordinator at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Minneapolis. Frosch educated the students on the Dakota-based techniques of circle discussion. In the method, groups passed a talking stick and shared personal experiences, careful not to try and speak for whole groups. Participants in the workshop also had time to practice in groups of three.
Intercultural Club hopes they addressed diversity in a broader sense than just skin color with CLIMB’s performance, which discussed ethnic background and sexuality as well. The planners of the discussion tried to “make it a more personal issue than kind of heady,” junior Ysabella Johnson said.“We don’t hope to meet any lofty goals, simply to educate people about issues of diversity in the community.”