Diversity Day is for Everyone

Last Thursday was no typical school day at NMH.

 

All day long, students, faculty, and staff gathered in classrooms across campus to talk about one idea: diversity. In workshops that covered sports, politics, religion, history, music, and popular culture, among other topics, NMH community members asked and attempted to answer tough questions.

 

Such as: Why do we feel the need to categorize one another? What does “transgender” really mean? Why do girls feel weird going into the weight room at the gym? Why are only white people considered racist? Why do people think all black people are good at sports? Why do the Asian kids sit together in the dining hall? How does where you come from influence the way you treat people?

 

NMH’s first annual Diversity Day was a campus-wide conference conceived and organized by Director of Multicultural Education James Greenwood, English teacher Janae Peters, and members of the faculty diversity committee. Teams of students, faculty, and staff led more than 70 workshops, and students signed up in advance to attend one or more of them. (Find the complete list here.) Attendance was mandatory, but all the listening and talking—and, in some cases, watching films and making art and food—gave participants the sense that they were tackling something bigger than their everyday class schedule.

 

“We wanted the day to be a wonderful mixture of reflective, uncomfortable, celebratory, introspective, informative, and enlightening,” Peters said. “The hope was that the NMH community uses this day to both appreciate how diverse we all are and acknowledge how far we have to go in terms of embracing our collective differences. Having a day to engage in these conversations…will make us all better community members.”

 

The night before Diversity Day, the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock gave a stunning concert in Memorial Chapel. On the same stage the next morning, actor and psychologist Michael Fowlin kicked off the day’s activities with a one-man show in which he portrayed different characters who have been negatively affected because of their differences—or who fear they could be.

 

There was an African-American football player who is secretly gay; a Jewish kid whose classmates tell him Hitler jokes and throw pennies at him; a boy who has cerebral palsy, uses a wheelchair, and has no friends; and a Korean-Indian teenage girl who gets suspended from school after arguing with the principal about feminism. “People tend to think about diversity in terms of race or ethnicity or sexual orientation,” Fowlin said. “But everyone is different in one way or another. All our experiences are important.”

 

After Fowlin’s performance, students lined up to meet him, hug him, and tell him how much they saw themselves in his characters. Then everyone fanned out across campus to begin their workshops, and for a moment, it looked almost like a typical school day. But it wasn’t.