ISCORE

ISCORE
Last Friday I attended ISCORE, Iowa State's Conference on Race and Ethnicity. I went to two sessions and also was a presenter for one.

The first Session I went to was "The Language of Cultural Racism." In this session the presenter talked about racist language and actions. Two examples that she gave were the "chink eye" which insults Asian Americans and "being gangster"/"acting black" aimed to insult African Americans. Her main purpose of the presentation was to bring awareness of these actions, and to inform people why it is considered racist. Even if everyone else is doing it, or you have someone of that race with you that does not make the action right. Towards the end we broke into group discussion and talked about more actions that would be insulting to other races. One that came up was everyone thinking that if you are Latino, you have to be an illegal immigrant.

The second session I attended was "Where We Place Race". I have read an article closely related to this topic calles, "When Place Becomes Race" by Sherene H. Razack. I would highly recommend it reading it. I the article it talks about why we associate certain race with certain places, for example, Chinatown with Asian American, Ghettos with African Americans and so on. It goes on to talk about how these races came to those places. In the session I attended at ISCORE the presenters talked about where we place race on the Iowa State Campus. They mentioned spots such as SUV apartments or the Multicultural Center. One thing they mentioned that I never thought about was the ethnic section in grocery stores. Why do they need ethnic sections? Why can't they just put it by the other food?

Overall I highly enjoyed ISCORE and hope to go again next year!