Diversity Project

This assignment was particularly difficult for me to complete. As an extremely introverted person who does not go out much, I fear talking to strangers. I was taught as a child not to talk to people in public that I do not know, and I never really grew out of that. I decided that for this project it was important to confront some of those fears, while also doing it in a safe space. I chose to talk to some people within the Goucher community that I from the outside appeared to be different than myself. Even though the Goucher bubble is a pretty safe place, it can still be difficult to step out of my comfort zone in order to talk to people that I have not previously had experiences with. I took an approach of first asking people if they were willing to be in a picture for a short class presentation and then if they were ok if I asked them a few questions. Honestly, this plan did not work as well as I wanted it to. It took a few tries before someone agreed. At one point, I asked a group of people who were together and we ended up having a pretty deep and interesting conversation about life struggles and how we can all improve ourselves. I have not really ever talked to strangers so openly before. 

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One of the conversations I had was about learning to identify and combat racist biases within ourselves. In class we talked about the differences between stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination. While having this conversation about race and identifying bias, I was also able to talk about these differences. I found that in multiple conversations people were not really aware of these differences (I had also not been aware previously) and it was nice to know that I was not alone in these thoughts. 

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I think this project also did do a lot of breaking social norms. As I mentioned earlier, I was taught as a child to not talk to strangers, as most people are taught. This project forced me to do that, which normally is not something people see on a daily basis.

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After completing this project, I will not say that going out of my comfort zone to talk to people I've never met is something that I will ever do again, but it does make me realize that I do walk around thinking that the people I see in public are judging me or that they are scary, when in reality, people are just people. Most of the time they aren't even paying attention to you unless you draw that attention to yourself.