Dallas Casino Night Fundraiser: Donate a Buck and Try Your Luck!

Thank you to everyone who attended our Dallas fundraiser! It was a small and rather last-minute affair, but it really just felt like a house party in which people gave us money (the best kind of party!) But what was probably best about it (other than getting to wear a feather boa for our “Casino Night” theme) was that we put together a fundraiser that is very low-cost and easily reproduce-able.

Aditi’s parents magically produced a bunch of gaming equipment from their garage, but if we were to do this particular fundraiser again, we could easily improvise the blackjack table, poker chips and “Jeopardy” board (Ok, so “Jeopardy” isn’t exactly in keeping with our casino theme, but it was a lot of fun.)

I’ll go into some detail here in case anyone who happens across this wants to put together their own fundraiser. We held it in Aditi’s parents’ family room and invited all of Aditi and her sister’s high school friends, family friends, friends of friends and friends of family friends via Facebook, email and a flurry of text messages. All of the family’s old board games and playing cards were pulled out of storage and put to use. A suggested donation of $5 bought you $500 in Monopoly money to play the various games or to buy poker chips. For an additional $1, you could enter our raffle to win a “Race Monologues™” poster and a gorgeous painted scroll Aditi bought in Singapore.

We were lucky in the prizes department—Aditi had lots of inexpensive souvenirs from the places she’d travelled in the last couple years that hadn’t been given away as gifts. I suppose in other circumstances the “prize wall” would also be a great opportunity to “re-gift” or “redistribute” things packed away at the back of your closet. Other than the raffle, we had a prize for a game in which people guessed how many beans were in a jar (although the game was inconveniently located and only one person guessed… so even though Sandip wrote down 500 as his guess and the actual amount was 1004, he was the proud winner of a Thai plate set) and an array of different prizes with various prices people could “buy” with their winnings.

We bought a couple of bottles of cheap red wine, citrus soda and fruit to make sangria, which was much cheaper than buying other alcohol. One bag of popcorn lasted the whole party.

Card games were set up in one half of the room and board games in the other. As guests began arriving, they seemed to naturally distribute themselves among the games. We had the movie 21 playing in the background, and it magically ended just as both of the games of “Outburst” and “Trivial Pursuit” were finishing up, making for the perfect opportunity to pause the party for our little speech. We got everyone’s attention and talked for a few minutes about our project, and then segued into a whole-group game of “Jeopardy”. All the questions were on the subject of race and racism, and we had categories like History, Science and Movies. The game sparks some interesting debates. Afterward, we played another group game, announced our raffle winner, and slowly the party came to an end.

Well, I don’t know how this blog turned into an article on how to throw a cheap fundraiser, but I’ll be blogging again soon about the actual field work we did in Dallas and Miami. I’ll just say now that I’m sorry for bringing New York’s weather with me to Texas and Florida… record lows in both places. I guess I’m taking it home with me though-- Miami is supposed to pop back up into the mid-seventies the day I leave. 

DC Fundraiser Photos

This is a bit belated, but here are a few photos from our DC Fundraiser, where our fabulous volunteers read some sample narratives from the preliminary research:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delivered from West Virginia

I must admit that Morgantown, West Virginia surprised me. I had never been to the state before last month, and while I had more nuanced expectations than the images from the film Deliverance, as a New Yorker I had prepared myself for some serious culture shock. As I began to talk to different people and hear about their experiences of race, I got a much more discordant and interesting view of the place.

I drove with some family from Washington, DC to Morgantown on a Friday night, and after checking into a hotel near the university’s football stadium (a bit of luxury compliments of my aunt and uncle before a week of “roughing it” on my cousin’s couch). We all went to dinner on the outskirts of the town at a chain seafood restaurant. It was hard to get much of an impression of the town initially in the dark, but the area where we went to eat had that suburban plaza familiarity. Our dinner spot was one in a line of national and regional chain restaurants, banks, gas stations and grocery stores.

The clientele seemed to be mostly, if not exclusively, white, but there was a bit more racial/ethnic diversity among the restaurants’ large front-end staff. Our waiter was a friendly young man from nearby Gaithersburg, Maryland who had spent five years at the West Virginia University and stayed in Morgantown looking for work after graduating. My aunt’s family lives near Gaithersburg also and began chatting with our waiter about restaurants and schools in the area. Our waiter got to talking about his high school. When he attended, it was a “really good” school, he said. But now, well, things had deteriorated. Yes, my cousin agreed, he’d heard that some of the schools in that area were having trouble. Our waiter looked very concerned, and told us about how much his alma mater had changed, and how upset all his friends were about it. He lowered his voice just a little and stood closer to our table.

           

“When I was there,” he said, “it was almost all white. But now, it’s majority black and there are lots of Hispanics, it’s a mess.” He gave a commiserative look around the table.

           

“There are so many problems at that school now, you know?”

I was stunned… not necessarily by the sentiment, but by the candor. Because we all appeared white, he felt confident enough that he could share his view on this with strangers and that we would, first, understand that an increase in the number of ethnic/ racial minorities corresponds to an increase in “trouble” at the school, and second, agree with the assessment.

So, I thought, this is what West Virginia is going to be like. This was a pretty silly and premature generalization, of course. I felt uncomfortable and fell back on my stereotypes-- not at all dissimilar from what my interviewees later did. An example I was given twice was something to the effect of, “If I’m in bad traffic, someone cuts me off, and I look over and see an Asian person, I think, oh, of course.” I hear what I considered a fairly racist statement, but when I’m in West Virginia, I think, oh, of course.

It’s just not as simple as all that, no place is. Certainly there are areas where racism is much more socially acceptable than others, but we can’t call out whole states or regions. Morgantown, West Virginia has been shaped in recently decades by the university that contributes some 30,000 students to its population. Many people I interviewed told me that Morgantown was a very tolerant place because of the presence of the university and the diversity it attracts. But, almost all qualified, go outside of the town and it’s a very different story.

           

Honestly, it was a little difficult to find local Morgantowners to interview. To hunt down the locals in a thriving college town, I figured my best bet was to ask professionals, shop-owners and employees, as well as folks on the street and in cafes. This turned out to be pretty hit or miss, but I did get some really interesting interviews (which you will be able to read on our website soon!) from both people who had grown up in West Virginia, and those who had come for the university.

I met a young white woman who had had trouble finding a place to live with her black boyfriend, because, she believed, landlords couldn’t accept a biracial couple. During a very brief interview at a bus stop, I heard from a former coal-miner who had not been allowed to ride “whites only” buses or attend white schools. I also talked to the head of the Muslim Student Association who had grown up in West Virginia and said racism wasn’t a “major issue” for him. 

I wish I had been able to spend more time in Morgantown and had the opportunity to talk to more people. I felt unsure at times that I was really getting a feel for the town, not just the university campus. The voices I did hear, however, were an interesting cacophony. They reminded me how easy it is to fall back on stereotypes, whether of a group of people, or a place, and how useless those stereotypes can be.

Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in Race Monologues in Morgantown. Your stories will help to patch together our understanding of how race is experienced in this country today. And a special thanks to my cousin for dousing his futon in Lysol before letting me crash there.