UMC looks to break down intercultural barriers

Amidst dancing and cooking lessons, food from all parts of the world and an abundance of performances, Thursday’s Celebration of Cultures showcased the diversity of various minority groups at Penn.

The event, sponsored by the United Minorities Council, featured 23 of its constituent groups, which set up tables on College Green with various interactive activities for passersby to enjoy. Celebration of Cultures is part of a larger effort to increase interculturalism on campus.

Intercultural dialogue “seems to have grown and increased in some inspiring ways on campus since the ’90s” when he was an undergraduate and former UMC chairman, University Chaplain Chaz Howard wrote in an e-mail.

He added that in addition to race-related dialogue, interfaith dialogue has also expanded in recent years.

Intercultural collaborations on campus are “strong, but there is a lot of room for growth,” Howard wrote.

On a campus as large as Penn’s, “it’s easy to self-segregate, if not ethnically, then socially or academically,” Wharton sophomore and UMC Financial Co-Chairwoman Aneesha Narra said.

Fatimah Muhammad, a 2006 Penn graduate who currently works at the Greenfield Intercultural Center, added that it may be easy to point out when racial groups stick together, but that in doing so, one can miss that there’s intercultural work going on even within racial groups of different nationalities.

Narra feels students should work toward finding commonalities across racial groups. “You can do more by finding things in common between groups, rather than capitalizing on your differences,” she said.

Events like Thursday’s, which included approximately 650 participants, are steps toward fostering a greater sense of interculturalism on campus.

According to UMC Chairman and Wharton and Nursing junior G.J. Melendez-Torres, “the kind of synergy that represents Celebration of Cultures is spectacular.”

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