Collegiate Times

As part of the Minority Scholars and Artists Guest Lecture series and Women's Month, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, professor of ethics and theology from Drew University, spoke Friday evening about the necessity of re-conceptualizing society's current understanding of differences.

?I deal with issues of difference because I believe how we look at differences is key ? In this society differences are understood in ways that sustain the status quo. My central preoccupation is to remedy this injustice,? Diaz said.

Sponsored in part by Womanspace and Sigma Delta Pi, Isasi-Diaz presented her ideas to a crowd composed primarily of female students. Although the event drew a gender-disproportionate audience, the messages discussed extend to all Tech students, said Laura Gillman, event organizer and interdisciplinary studies associate professor.

?We're undergoing a crisis here at Virginia Tech in terms of diversity. We don't have a language to talk about it ? We need to acquire the tools and we need people that can help us think through the issues,? said Gillman.

Gillman explained she brought Isasi-Diaz on campus to help students and community members gain a different perspective when dealing with diversity. Opening the event, Gillman illustrated this need for change with numbers taken from Tech's diversity webpage.

According to the Tech's Diversity Strategic Plan Gillman cited, ?The Undergraduate Student Assessment of Campus Climate? 59 percent of white survey respondents characterized the university climate as relatively non-racist while only 24 percent of black survey respondents agreed. Gillman also noted that Tech's black student enrollment not only remains below the Commonwealth's average but has decreased annually since 2000.

Isasi-Diaz traveled to Tech to discuss altering certain injustices. She explained that every community maintains a master narrative comprised ?of the people who benefit from the set structures? and that challenging these narratives is complicated but essential for attaining justice.

?The conversation about justice has to start from the perspective from those who suffer injustice,? she said. ?Anytime we challenge the operational narrative it's difficult because it goes against what anchors us.?

Isasi-Diaz continued by discrediting society's typical remedy of assimilation for dealing with differences as possessing negative consequences for minority groups. To Isasi-Diaz, assimilation forces people who are different to internalize the negative understandings created by the normative group.

?The way we think about differences makes many think that the only solution is making differences disappear ? to say that it doesn't matter that you're different. But I want them to matter,? she said.

In order to attain justice, Isasi-Diaz offered strategies to implement a re-conceptualized understanding of differences which many found helpful for the Blacksburg setting.

?Most speakers come here and don't give you a strategy for change. She gave us a practical idea of how to mend things in our lives,? said Christina Pe?a, Gillman's assistant and junior communication major.

Isasi-Diaz recommended people notice similarities instead of always applying negativity to differences.

?Most of the time we think about differences we immediately go to a judgment and say it's better or worse, when in reality it's just different,? Pe?a said.

Another solution, ?de-centering,? requires people to personally adjust their perceptions away from themselves, a lesson Gillman believes extremely important for Tech students. ?We need to do the work of de-centering ourselves ? I couldn't help but think of Virginia Tech, and how we perpetuate whiteness in our protocols and practices. If we work for change, people are going to come to us that are different,? she said.

With Isasi-Diaz's strategies in mind, many left the presentation with an altered perception of diversity. ?She was great and really informative. It provided a new way to look at things. I had never thought about some of these things in this light before,? said Matthew Tryon, freshman engineering major.

Similarly, Pe?a hoped that Isasi-Diaz messages might infiltrate the Tech campus.

?(The event) was phenomenal for our community ? There were so many people here and just the fact that they were open to a new idea and now they are going to spread it to other people, it's going to help our community immensely,? Pe?a said.