Hello, all!
My name is Gayoung Kim and I am in the art group. While googling, Timothy and I found an interesting dance performance to share with everybody. It is called, Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home, performed by an anti-racist choreographer, Meghan Abadoo. She, as a black woman dance performer, tries to reveal the identity of black womanhood (It is all performed by black female dancers) and to create a space for freely sharing the vulnerability of black women with the witnesses who watch the performance. Throughout the performance, one movement captured my sight really strongly when the performers try to run forward but they keep failing because of cloth tying their bodies to the walls from 26’-33’. (The whole performance is 46 minutes, but I think this part is the highlight.) The dancers keep trying to reach forward but they tumble and fall, and I felt like that is the reality of racism and gender discrimination.
Meghan Abadoo also wrote a short essay about the subtle systematic injustice in society and how University of Maryland tries to deal with it. She points out that it is a widely held misconception that racial inequality does not exist anymore because race-based discrimination is illegal and shares the moment when she participated the Words of Engagement intergroup dialogue program at University of Maryland. There, she had profound experience gathering with people of different racial backgrounds, listening divergent viewpoints and stories.
Personally, as an Asian female student, I have not experienced specific occasion, but her words made me think about how race and gender are still the issue to resolve and how those are under-estimated as a problem. I think this performance is a worth while piece to watch.
You can watch the performance here:
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/18432
And her essay, you can read it here:
http://terp.umd.edu/sights-unseen-2/#Abadoo
And here some inviting questions to think for you all;
- Do you think racial or gender discrimination is still prevalent in US higher education institutions today?
- What do you think are the merits and limitations of Abadoo’s project of using dance as a medium to champion notions of racial and gender equality in HE institutions?
- Are you able to think of any other ways for HE institutions to leverage their academic and cultural influence to advocate social causes in the world? How might these ways or approaches differ in an Asian HE context?
The dance is extremely powerful to me. I think the racial or gender discrimination is still an problem against education equality in high education institutions today. I came to USA in high school. It is a high priced private Christian high school. There were only three African American students in my entire class (65 kids). I think it has to do with the social mobility in USA. As a immigrates country, it is difficult to avoid some races are doing worse than others in general. The racial and gender discrimination does not appear in high education all of the sudden. It was from the start point of the education. Sometimes i do not think it is not fair to say high education admission has potential for racial discrimination, there might be just less black students with 2300 SAT scores applying Columbia or Harvard.
Speaking from personal experience when I studied in the UK, there weren’t many outright protests against racial or gender discrimination in my university. But I remember that several of my friends of British African descent came together to stage a play about racial discrimination and their experiences of racial tensions on campus. And that also coincided with dialogue sessions on Black Britishness organised by a student group called “Let’s Talk Black”. I participated in one of the group sessions on Black Britishness, and found that modes of communication such as performance and group discussion provided a valuable and not to mention, *SAFE* space for individuals to express their frustrations and for the collective group to brainstorm helpful solutions, remedies, and affirmative actions to combat racial and gender discrimination.