Aaron Johnson – General Assignment Reporter
Stepping into another person’s shoes can almost always be an eye-opening experience. By getting the opportunity to see how other people are treated based off things as petty as skin color, religion, or sexual orientation. For students that attended the Women’s Studies Tunnel of Oppression event on this past Sunday night, eye opening does not even begin to describe it.
“I thought it was a powerful thing to see,” said Southern junior Jose Collado. “I kind of got dragged here by my friend for her class, but I’m glad I came out to see something like this. It was an eye-opening experience.”
The Tunnel of Oppression is an interactive event that highlights contemporary issues of oppression designed to introduce participants to the concepts of oppression, privilege, and power. Participants are guided through a series of scenes that aim to educate and challenge them to think more deeply about issues of oppression.
“Getting the opportunity to really see how the other half lives and the things that they go through was something that I felt was important,” said Isabel Pellot. “You honestly never really think about stuff like that because it doesn’t effect you unless your in that position.”
Pellot – a junior transfer student – said that going in she really did not know too much about the show, but she enjoyed learning the different struggles that people have due to things like race, sexual orientation, and background.
“I would definitely say it was an eye-opening experience. Sometimes you think that just because it’s 2014 that things like that don’t still exist when the real truth is that it does,” Pellot said.
According to the Western Illinois University website, the Tunnel of Oppression is a campus grassroots diversity program that originated in 1993. Using the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California as a model, the Tunnel of Oppression strives to give people a way to experience oppression in a hands-on way. By engaging emotions of the participants, it allows for the accounts expressed in the program to be truly effective. For individuals that may have never been placed in these types of situations, and they obtain a sense of what it actually feels like to be oppressed or discriminated through the sights and sounds they experience. While Tunnel may be disturbing, it is an effective tool used to teach people about how it really feels to be in the various situations.
“As a young man, a young Dominican man, I understand that I sometimes have to deal with stereotypes and I think this kind of event gave the chance for other people to see that they are just untrue stereotypes and that hurtful things can in fact still hurt people,” Collado said.
The event was apart of the Women’s Studies ’64 Days of Non-violence’ which began on January 30th – the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. This is the 11th observation at Southern. According to the Southern Connecticut State website, several different organizations contribute to the 64 days including: SCSU American Association of University (AAUP); Black Student Union; SCSU Faculty and Development Office; the SCSU Chapter of the Iota Iota Iota National Women’s Studies Honor Society;
Minority Recruitment and Retention Committee (MRRC); Multicultural Center; Office of Diversity and Equity; SCSU SAGE Center; Women’s Center; Women’s Studies Program. Outside SCSU, our sister collaborators include African American Women’s Summit Committee and the Coalition of Women’s Studies in CT & RI (CWMSC).
“This was my first event for the 64 days of non-violence I’ve been to,” Pellot said. “This is my first semester here so I didn’t really know Southern did something like this. But I think that striving to have that many days of non-violence is a great goal to shoot for.”
