The fact that the Black Lives Matter movement is still ongoing today signals that those in the movement care and that it matters, LaNia Roberts said Wednesday night.

The first Interfaith Dialogue Dinner Series of the semester, titled “Common and Diverse Ground: Raising Consciousness by Acknowledging the ‘Hidden’ Things that Divide Us,” was centered around the Black Lives Matter movement. It was held at 6:30 p.m. in the Noble Room of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University on Wednesday.

About 50 people attended the event.

Bonnie Shoultz, a Buddhist chaplain and the leader of the Student Buddhist Association, began the event with a mindful meditation session. She asked participants to keep their mind in the moment and to bring it back in focus whenever it wandered.

She rang a bell four times to signify the beginning of the meditation. Most people closed their eyes during the meditation. After five minutes of silence, Shoultz rang the bell once, ending the meditation.

Afterward, Diane Wiener, director of the Disability Cultural Center, thanked everybody for attending. She gave a special shout out to LaNia Roberts, a junior painting major and co-facilitator of the event. Roberts led the dialogue alongside Gail Riina, a Lutheran chaplain.

Riina began by recounting that as a white person living in suburbia, she was taught by those closest to her to fear black people.

“I believe you can be a person of privilege and not have any experience of oppression and still have solidarity with people who have been oppressed,” Riina said.

She then pulled up a presentation with statistics from the Pew Research Center comparing how much each race supports the BLM movement, their views on race relations in the United States and the wealth gap between black people and whites in the country.

After Riina contextualized the presented statistics, Roberts took over. She put participants in smaller groups to promote discussion. Each group was given a question to discuss to start the conversation.

While some of the groups had a slow start to their conversations, by the end of their discussion, conversation was flowing —  people were grimacing, others were laughing and some had tears welling up in their eyes.

After 20 minutes, Roberts asked the groups to choose a representative to share what they had talked about.

Phelicia Ball, a senior writing and rhetoric major, said her group went in a lot of different directions, but they ultimately said BLM is important because it highlights what black people have been going through since slavery.

“We are still slaves in this country, we are still being systematically oppressed, we are still caged,” Ball said. “Literally caged.”

Michael Anthony Kelly, a junior English and textual studies major, said his group discussed how the education system is failing students. In school, he said, people are only taught a very small portion of black people’s oppression, and even then it is without much detail.

“There are so many things that we are unaware of,” Kelly said. “Black Lives Matter is us teaching ourselves and becoming informed.”

Roberts opened up a new dialogue and said sometimes, because the BLM movement is so large, it can make individuals feel small. She said she does her part to further BLM in her day-to-day life through the art she produces. Roberts asked participants to share what they do to stay connected.

Claudia Klaver, an associate professor of English at SU, said she started a BLM reading group at her church, which is comprised of mostly middle-aged white people, so that they could educate themselves rather than putting the burden of educating white people on those who are already oppressed.

Published on September 30, 2016 at 10:06 pm

Contact Stacy: sfern100@syr.edu | @StacyFernandezB