[Bgreen1591]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

I think the diversity is much better in naturally diverse places. In lower NY we are naturally very diverse and the teams are by result.

The only "naturally" diverse place in "lower NY" as you put it would be, New York City (Correct me if I am wrong). That being said, the reason why it is so diverse is because the event hosts "inner city" and international kids. Many of the student participants are minorities, i.e African America, Hispanic/Latino, Asian etc. many of whom are mentored by minorities as well. In my opinion, the problem comes when you see the staff working the events and competitions. It even surfaces among the invited speakers or guest. Many states may vary and have minorities represented but i have yet to see it on a larger scale or with consistency.

Originally Posted by jeser#1772

This is a very interesting discussion

In Brazil we do not differentiate people, we just have Brazilians in Brazil

I remember answering the FIRST questionnaire about the percentage each ethnicity within the team and not actually knowing what to do...

I ended up spending a long time thinking what to answer and at the end I just ticked "other” and put "people" in the box, I also requested that FIRST did not ask me that again.

I am glad to see that racism and prejudice does not exist in Brazil, maybe U.S should take some notes. But as humans, we try to avoid conversation that we are not comfortable with. In society, we demonized such issues so much that people avoid having meaningful conversation about it.

Originally Posted by FrankJ

Not that many people make a big deal of his ethnicity, but Lonnie Johnson (inventor of the super soaker) is a supporter of First. I not sure if he is a judge, but he gave substantial speeches at the Peachtree & Georgia Southern Classic regionals. (past tense because we are going to districts next year.) He also hosts one of Georgia's DE fields at his research facility.

It's great to hear about things like this. It should be spread on a national/international level. Any participant of FIRST should be able to look at a flyers or listen to guest speak and say, "I want to be like her/him" or "He/She looks like me" creating possibility for that student to aspire.




I saw a TED talk a while back where the speaker said, “Scholars have created this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem.” Mellody Hobson TED 2014. According to the “FIRST Program Evaluation” done by the Center for Youth and Communities, at Brandeis University, only 27% of participants in FRC are non-white. Out of 60 people in “leadership” positions at FIRST only 6 would be considered non-white based on research done on the FIRST website. Information also gathered from the FIRST website also shows that only 7 State Senior Mentors would be considered non-white. A lot of times we pretend these issue don’t exist in our homes, our schools, at our job, in our grocery stores, even within FIRST. We need to bring more awareness to these problems, so that we can as NYC FIRST says, “Discover the genius in every kid”