On Sept. 10, students gathered outside the Brossman Commons to participate in the Unity Rally, run by the Elizabethtown College Office of Diversity, Equity & Belonging. The Unity Rally was created to celebrate the identities of Etown students and what makes each of us unique.
Sitting around the outside borders of the event were tables set up by some of the clubs belonging to the Intercultural Board.
Some of these include, but aren’t limited to, the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA), the Japanese and Spanish clubs and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Some tables brought free merchandise, and almost all included sign up sheets to join the clubs.
The Japanese club just came back together after COVID-19 and are ready to get started again sharing and discussing Japanese culture through planned events.
The GSA had fun pride stickers that students could take.
Women in STEM attended, too, and discussed their mentorship program and their goal to make a community of support and motivation.
NAACP stated that their goal was to have social justice in the community and spoke about how it was important to have a voice.
However, the largest part of the event was the collection of rainbow poles in the middle. Each one featured a different statement that students could identify with, ranging from topics on race, politics, gender/sexuality, leisure and place of origin. Students were instructed to take a ball of yarn and wrap it around the poles that they identify with, starting with the pole in the middle that said, “I am a Blue Jay.” The idea was to end up with many colors of yarn going in different directions, creating a beautiful colorful image from looking above the poles.
When asked about the goal of the event Executive Director for Diversity, Equity & Belonging Nichole Gonzalez said, “The goal of the event is to highlight that we all have different identities and to celebrate that and to draw awareness and attention to it.”
At their departure from the event, students were given a series of reflection questions about identity and belonging.
“The goal is that we are a unified community, and the reflection questions really try to draw out why people might not feel like they belong, or might be hesitant to own an identity or something like that within the community,” Gonzalez said.
A week after the rally, another event will be held to discuss its outcomes and the reflection questions. The announcement for that event will come out within the next few days. “It’ll be super brief, 10 or 15 minutes, and then we’ll actually take this down, and people can take yarn with them if they want to have something,” Gonzalez said, referring to the reflection.
One of the larger goals of the Unity Rally was to combat the typical ideologies of other unity events. “I think a lot of times when people think unity, we do that and we try to gloss over all the things that make us different, so that we can focus on us being together,” Gonzalez said. She wanted this event to highlight the students’ individuality, not ignore it.
“The goal is to make sure people understand that in order to have unity, we need to understand and acknowledge different identities,” she said.
When asked if there would be more events like this one, Gonzalez stated that there were a lot of plans within the Office of Diversity, Equity & Belonging, as well as the Student Life Division, Office of Student Activities, etc.
With plans to include academics as well, “It’s really a theme for us for this year, so I definitely would expect for us to see more,” she said.
