OSU-Cascades hosting diversity discussions

OSU-Cascades officials want the Central Oregon community to start thinking about diversity. To help get people started, they’re offering a few workshops.

From February through May, OSU-Cascades is hosting a series of discussions to help reframe people’s thoughts on racism and, hopefully, make it easier to talk about.

As part of the celebrations honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Oregon State University’s main campus in Corvallis hosted the mother of Trayvon Martin on Monday.

In 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, was found not guilty of any charges. Since then, Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, has turned her family’s tragedy into a movement for social change.

While she was speaking in Corvallis, dozens of people of all ages sat in on a livestream viewing session at OSU-Cascades in Bend, listening to her hard-earned experiences with race and racism.

A big takeaway was actually a rather simple concept. Fulton said she — and her son — are average people. But it’s average people who must make the moves to inspire change in our society. Fulton urged her audience to not wait for something bad to happen — get involved now. Don’t wait to make positive change.

“You should use your voice for something positive,” Fulton said. “You speak out against what’s wrong. You have to do that. You should not be able to live with yourself knowing that people are doing negative things and you are not doing anything about it and you could.”

“Use your power to empower others,” she said.

When the talks were over, those in the Bend classroom watching her held their own discussion about race and racism.

One man NewsChannel 21 spoke with said he’s been a part of the civil rights movement since the 1960s. Dalton Miller-Jones, a retired university professor and a leader in the Restorative Justice & Equity group, said events like these give him hope for the future.

“I see we’re slowly beating back the darkness. we’re slowly bringing, to quote Dr. King, light in the places that are dark. I’m encouraged by that,” he said.

“I know that it’s very discouraging, in a lot of ways, to see what’s going on in the world today,” Miller-Jones continued. “But I believe these are the last throes of a really old way of thinking and dominating. We are learning how to be cooperative and how to be team players.”

In the spirit of cooperation and societal growth, OSU-Cascades on Monday hosted the first in a series of workshops, called “The Path to Racial Justice: Recalibrating our Racial Compass.”

Each workshop will focus on a key theme from the book “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, such as the idea of white privilege.

The university’s diversity coordinator, Erin Rook, said he hopes the discussions will show racism is different than how we’ve come to understand it.

“The reality is that racism, all the -isms really, are in the water we drink and in the air we breathe,” he explained. “We cant avoid them, right? It’s like an environmental toxin.”

“We don’t need to feel shame or guilt that we’ve been impacted by the environment that we’re in, but we all have a responsibility to work to address it, ” he said.

OSU-Cascades’ free diversity workshops will be held on the third Thursday of every month through May.

Find more information about the workshops here.