With this semester’s racial and homophobic incidents in our memories and cries from the “Erase the Hate” rally still ringing in our ears, it is really important to examine issues of diversity as both students on the Ithaca College campus and as citizens poised to mold the future of our society. It is the intellectual acceptance of our differences that is essential for creating human harmony rather than any nominal guarantee of tolerance or promise to end racism or sexism. The way to erase hatred is to foster dialogue between people in a community where questions of race, culture, gender and ethnicity are openly discussed and internalized, not by force or obligation, but by way of reason, inspiration and enlightenment.
History is important to this discussion because it allows us to examine the present from the context of the past as we acknowledge past mistakes and continue to build on previous achievements. The essay on the struggles of Soviet women over the course of the 20th century allows us to draw important parallels with our own cultural and social experience, for the plight of women in the patriarchal system is indeed a global problem. The author reveals many different perceptions and realities of Soviet political and social life while examining women’s ongoing struggles and complex experiences in the communist system.
The next essay takes us forward into the post 9/11 world where cultural and ethnic identities have played a large role in the Muslim Americans’ ability to live freely in the United States. The author analyzes a number of fascinating interviews and statistics to reveal an underplayed dynamic of our country’s recent “War on Terrorism” where racial profiling and loss of basic constitutional rights are only the beginning of a legal and social assault on the lives of thousands of Muslims in America. Our third author develops a new theory on romantic relationships as a social construct, taking his readers back to the Middle Ages and then forward through the 20th century to examine relationships between men and women on a new level. He challenges our culture’s greater conception of romance as a personal phenomenon, and proposes that it exists to perpetuate a patriarchal power structure central to society’s status quo. We ask both students and faculty to take this publication as an invitation to engage in a productive dialogue about the issues of diversity we face and their impacts on us as individuals and as a community, and to take advantage of the opportunity this journal presents for self exploration and scholarship.
Zoë, Ivan, KT, Kim, Dre, and Piko