Voices of Discovery

For Voices of Discovery, I was in a Races in America group. Overall, it was a positive experience. It was very eye opening to hear about the experiences of people from many different backgrounds. It is not that I had never had experience with diversity, it was just in a little bit different way than others in my group. Also, I have never really had to deal with big stereotypes like some of the people in my group, so it was interesting to hear how people deal with them. Usually when I thought about race issues, I thought exclusively about things between whites and African Americans because that is what I have dealt with on a personal level. Being in this group reminded me that there are issues among other races as well, especially with Native Americans here in South Dakota. In the group, we talked a lot about our experiences with other races. It was interesting to hear different perspectives from almost every race here at USD. Many of the people in my group talked about big events that have taken place in the area or that made national news that I had never heard about.

For one session we went to what we thought was going to be a performance by Native American members of a play on campus that ended up being a different kind of group discussion. We exclusively talked about Native American history and how America was really formed. That session was probably my favorite because it exposed me to a lot of things that I had never heard of. It also gave everyone in the group a chance to really think and talk about their origin and how they feel about where they come from. At first it was a little awkward because it was not what we expected, but I thought it was a really enjoyable experience in the end.

One thing I did not like about my group was that we ended up talking about the same things a lot of the time. I thought there were several things that we could have discussed that we never got the chance to, however this might just be because there are only a limited number of sessions. Another thing that I did not like was the length of the sessions because my group only had breaks for some of the sessions. I think I would have rather gone to more sessions that had a little bit shorter time length. But again, overall I thought it was a good experience.