Diversity Week

2 Pages 388 Words

For Diversity Week, I attended the 2pm show of Finding Common Ground: Resolving Cultural Conflicts with Music and Nonviolence. The show featured musicians that comprise the group Common Ground on the Hill out of McDaniel College. The group consists of a lead singer, two guitarists, and a man on the harmonica. The show lasted about 45 minutes because of technical difficulties in the beginning.
Common Ground on the Hill played a variety of music in the show, mainly consisting of blues, gospel, and spirituals. All of the songs were done in a way to get the audience involved, either by singing certain words, clapping, or even standing in a line behind the singer and dancing together. The main topics that the performance dealt with were liberal thinking, allowing for deeper thinking and living, and equality in race and ethnic backgrounds. The performers talked a while about legacies and family stories, as well as non-violence and peace studies.
While this performance did not open my eyes to anything new about world peace and race equality, it did make me feel more “at home” with my fellow URI students that attended. We all had to act in ways during the performance that most, if not all of us, would never out of Diversity Week because the thought of public humiliation, but during the performance none of us had to worry about that. I think that this particular topic dealt mostly with public perception, which we covered in class. The topic in class was public perception of crime, but the performance falls more into the category of public opinion and maybe even public fear. We are all told that minorities are the “bad guys.” They are the people that commit the most crimes and they are the poor people that our taxes go to. These ideas are very stereotypical, but it is the message that the government and especially the media try to make us believe. All that Common Ground was trying to accomplish was to get us to look past t...