Election sheds new light on Unity Week

The United Minorities Council has hosted Unity Week - its signature celebration of diversity and cross-cultural awareness - in the late fall for at least 20 years.

But this year, something is different: It coincides with a historic election featuring the first female and black presidential contenders.

While exploring unity and understanding is on the event's agenda every year, students planning the week say the timing of the election makes issues like race and gender more salient than ever.

"We hope to use the election as a stage for discussion," College junior and UMC political chairman Lorenzo Williams said. "There are obviously racial and gender barriers being broken in politics, but they also reflect barriers that everyday people are breaking today."

Two events in particular embody focal points of the election. Most overt is an open dialogue called "Race and Gender in the Presidential Election," which is co-hosted by the Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women.

The founding members of activist groups the Black Panther Party, the Red Guard and Young Lord will also appear together under the theme of "United in the Struggle: The Past, Present and Future of Grassroots Activism," co-sponsored by three multicultural fraternities.

UMC chairwoman, Daily Pennsylvanian columnist and College and Wharton Senior Lisa Zhu said Unity Week has waned over the past few years, so the UMC is focusing on identity politics in addition to revitalization efforts like bringing back the keynote speaker event and increasing collaborations with other campus groups.

Though race and gender have been used as divisors during the campaign, Unity Week coordinators say it's important to consider them as unifiers and symbols of progress.

"These struggles aren't separate entities," Williams said. "At the end of the day, we're all struggling for a common goal. We're all moving in the same direction."

PCUW co-chairwoman and College senior Brooke Boyarsky agreed that "it doesn't make sense to have a discussion about just race or just gender. All these barriers are being broken."

The event coordinators stressed that their organizations and constituent groups continually engage in these types of discussions throughout the year. And thanks to a storm of political activity on campus, more students than ever are active - even if they don't know it.

PCUW co-chairwoman and Wharton senior Abigail Dosoretz said that an abundance of conversations, events and media commentary means "people are engaging in gender and race issues, even if they're not necessarily formalizing it."

And although the election is a "coincidental benefit" of Unity Week's schedule, the weight of the decisions that will be made on Nov. 4 make it even more important to have conversations about "how far we have to go and how far we've come," said Wharton junior and Latino Coalition Communications chairman Jose Barreiro.

He said the keynote event is designed to bridge gaps between communities by highlighting the similarities of their struggles.

And, he added, he wants to create a campus buzz. "We're looking to create a little bit of shock with radical speakers who are really going to challenge some of the conceptions we have of racial tensions in the U.S.," Barreiro said.

He said he hopes the event gets people thinking about race relations in new ways.

"We want everyone to come out of the room with at least one idea they never had before."

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