Unity, Diversity & Understanding

SIX DIRECTIONS: All you ever wanted to know and more!

2007-10-31T18:12:00.001-07:00

Hi UMC friends,

Most of you guys are aware of Six Directions' presence on campus and within UMC, but our members do a lot of advocacy behind the scenes that I'd like to bring to the community's attention! That's what the UMC blog is for, right? Here is a little something that I wrote up about 6D for Penn's Center for Native American Studies forthcoming newsletter. Hope you learn somethin!

Mia

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Six Directions is Penn’s Native American affiliation and interest group. Originally founded in 1994 by alumni Desiree Martinez and Bryan Brayboy, the group’s primary dedication is to raise awareness of Native Americans on Penn’s campus. Throughout its brief history it has experienced a lot of frustration, but also a lot of progress to that end.

During the late 1990s the group lacked organization and lost momentum. In 2001, members Jaime Hale and Sabrina Austin revived the group and it has been going strong ever since. Our activities include general meetings for discussion and planning, which provide community-building among Native students and allies, participation in Penn’s United Minorities Council umbrella organization, as well as strategic meetings with university faculty and staff to increase awareness of Native issues at Penn. In the past two years we have met with the University Provost, the Dean of Admissions, and representatives from the Office of the President to discuss our concerns and provide suggestions for improvement.

Concerns we have brought to the University’s attention center on the topics of student recruitment/retention, increasing Native faculty and staff, and creating a Native American Studies program or minor.

As it stands, Native Americans are the most underrepresented group in Penn’s undergraduate admissions, at less than 1 percent of the incoming class. This number lags behind other Ivy League schools. Penn also has zero Native faculty. We feel that the university must continuously try to improve its recruitment efforts by supporting the Center for Native American Studies (CNAS) and creating a Native American Studies Program that includes both academic and student life programming.

Penn can offer so many resources to Native students who are interested in studying in an urban environment. We believe the University must seriously commit to increasing the number of Native students who are given access to these opportunities.

In addition to advocacy within the University, Six Directions connects with communities outside Penn. Through the dedication of our mentor and elder Ann Dapice, we have made lasting connections with the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, attending their annual powwow and collaborating on events.

Perhaps most importantly, for the last three years we have participated in the bi-annual gatherings of the All-Ivy Native Council (AINC). AINC is a consortium of all the Native American student groups in the Ivies (and a few other Northeast universities). AINC provides a much needed space for collaborating on ideas and strategies, and of course making friends!

This past April, Six Directions hosted the larger of the two annual AINC events, the All-Ivy Native Conference. Our theme was, “Raising Visibility and Voice.” Over 100 Native students from across the Ivies attended. They arrived after long hours on buses, cars, and trains. They slept on dorm-room floors of their Penn student hosts. This gives you an idea of the members’ dedication to AINC!

Hosting the Conference was a huge undertaking and there are so many people who poured their heart and soul into making the event happen. Six Directions started planning in September and did not stop till April. We raised over $18,000 from University and private sources. All in all, we pulled off a weekend conference that was jam-packed with world-class presenters and content. Participants heard presentations by: Joe Garcia, President of the National Congress of American Indians; Suzan Harjo, primary litigant in the pending defamation court case against the Washington Redskins; Rosita Worl, who sits on the board of the National Museum of the American Indian; among many others.

We hope that the University will take notice of the Conference and realize the contributions that Native peoples can make to this community if more are given the chance.

Thank you for your continued support of Six Directions! We will keep doing our part if you do yours!

Marketplace of Ideas

2007-09-24T09:59:00.001-07:00

Here is a letter the president of Columbia University sent to students regarding Ahmadinejad's controversial visit today. I thought it made a good point about acceptance, academic freedom and encouraging a marketplace of ideas. Enjoy.
-AA

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Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:

I would like to share a few thoughts about today's appearance of
President Ahmadinejad at our World Leaders Forum. I know this is a
matter of deep concern for many in our University community and
beyond. I want to say first and foremost how proud I am of
Columbia, especially our students, as we discuss, debate and plan
for this highly visible event.

I ask that each of us make special efforts to respect the different
views people have about the event and to recognize the different
ways it affects members of our community. For many reasons, this
will demand the best of each of us to live up to the best of
Columbia's traditions.

For the School of International and Public Affairs, which developed
the idea for this forum as the commencement to a year-long
examination of 30 years of the Islamic Republic in Iran, this is an
important educational experience for training future leaders to
confront the world as it is -- a world that includes far too many
brutal, anti-democratic and repressive regimes. For the rest of us,
this occasion is not only about the speaker but quite centrally
about us -- about who we are as a nation and what universities can
be in our society.

I would like just to repeat what I have said earlier: It is vitally
important for a university to protect the right of our schools, our
deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes.
Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with
beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even
odious.

But it should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we
deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the
weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about
the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical
premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable
when we open the public forum to their voices.

The great majority of student leaders with whom I met last week
affirmed their belief that this event, however controversial, is
consistent with the values of academic freedom we share at the
center of university life. I fully support, indeed I celebrate, the
right to peacefully demonstrate and engage in a dialogue about this
event and this speaker, as I understand a wide coalition of our
student groups are planning for today. That such a forum and such
public criticism of President Ahmadinejad's statements and policies
could not safely take place on a university campus in Iran today
sharpens the point of what we do here. The kind of freedom that
will be on display at Columbia has always been and remains today
our nation's most potent weapon against repressive regimes
everywhere in the world. This is the power and example of America
at its best.

Sincerely,

Lee C. Bollinger

"Our Prejudices, Ourselves"

2007-04-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hey UMC Fam,

I ran across this op-ed piece by Harvey Fierstein this morning, which I found to be incredibly powerful. It articulates so clearly my feeligs about UMC and what we are supposed to be doing, especially the last paragraph...I hope this resonates with a few others

cheers,

Efe

"Our Prejudices, Ourselves"

AMERICA is watching Don Imus's self-immolation in a state of shock and awe. And I'm watching America with wry amusement.

Since I'm a second-class citizen -- a gay man -- my seats for the ballgame of American discourse are way back in the bleachers. I don't have to wait long for a shock jock or stand-up comedian to slip up with hateful epithets aimed at me and mine. Hate speak against homosexuals is as commonplace as spam. It's daily traffic for those who profess themselves to be regular Joes, men of God, public servants who live off my tax dollars, as well as any number of celebrities.
In fact, I get a good chuckle whenever someone refers to "the media" as an agent of "the gay agenda." There are entire channels, like Spike TV, that couldn't fill an hour of programming if required to remove their sexist and homophobic content. We've got a president and a large part of Congress willing to change the Constitution so they can deprive of us our rights because they feel we are not "normal."

So I'm used to catching foul balls up here in the cheap seats. What I am really enjoying is watching the rest of you act as if you had no idea that prejudice was alive and well in your hearts and minds.

For the past two decades political correctness has been derided as a surrender to thin-skinned, humorless, uptight oversensitive sissies. Well, you anti-politically correct people have won the battle, and we're all now feasting on the spoils of your victory. During the last few months alone we've had a few comedians spout racism, a basketball coach put forth anti-Semitism and several high-profile spoutings of anti-gay epithets.

What surprises me, I guess, is how choosy the anti-P.C. crowd is about which hate speech it will not tolerate. Sure, there were voices of protest when the TV actor Isaiah Washington called a gay colleague a "faggot." But corporate America didn't pull its advertising from "Grey's Anatomy," as it did with Mr. Imus, did it? And when Ann Coulter likewise tagged a presidential candidate last month, she paid no real price.

In fact, when Bill Maher discussed Ms. Coulter's remarks on his HBO show, he repeated the slur no fewer than four times himself; each mention, I must note, solicited a laugh from his audience. No one called for any sort of apology from him. (Well, actually, I did, so the following week he only used it once.)

Face it, if a Pentagon general, his salary paid with my tax dollars, can label homosexual acts as "immoral" without a call for his dismissal, who are the moral high and mighty kidding?
Our nation, historically bursting with generosity toward strangers, remains remarkably unkind toward its own. Just under our gleaming patina of inclusiveness, we harbor corroding guts. America, I tell you that it doesn't matter how many times you brush your teeth. If your insides are rotting your breath will stink. So, how do you people choose which hate to embrace, which to forgive with a wink and a week in rehab, and which to protest? Where's my copy of that rule book?

Let me cite a non-volatile example of how prejudice can cohabit unchecked with good intentions. I am a huge fan of David Letterman's. I watch the opening of his show a couple of times a week and have done so for decades. Without fail, in his opening monologue or skit Mr. Letterman makes a joke about someone being fat. I kid you not. Will that destroy our nation? Should he be fired or lose his sponsors? Obviously not.

But I think that there is something deeper going on at the Letterman studio than coincidence. And, as I've said, I cite this example simply to illustrate that all kinds of prejudice exist in the human heart. Some are harmless. Some not so harmless. But we need to understand who we are if we wish to change. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess to not only being a gay American, but also a fat one. Yes, I'm a double winner.)

I urge you to look around, or better yet, listen around and become aware of the prejudice in everyday life. We are so surrounded by expressions of intolerance that I am in shock and awe that anyone noticed all these recent high-profile instances. Still, I'm gladdened because our no longer being deaf to them may signal their eventual eradication.

The real point is that you cannot harbor malice toward others and then cry foul when someone displays intolerance against you. Prejudice tolerated is intolerance encouraged. Rise up in righteousness when you witness the words and deeds of hate, but only if you are willing to rise up against them all, including your own. Otherwise suffer the slings and arrows of disrespect silently.

Welcome!

2007-04-05T00:17:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the student-run blog of United Minorities Council (UMC) at the University of Pennsylvania. This blog is meant to be a forum for minority students to express their concerns and sentiments regarding unity, diversity and understanding both at Penn and with our community at large. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at unitedminoritiescouncil@gmail.com. Enjoy!
-The UMC Board