Shades of Princeton site provides forum

To establish a campus-based forum for incidents of discrimination, Sustained Dialogue launched a website titled, "Shades of Princeton" last Thursday.

The website, shadesofprinceton.org, encourages members of the University community to anonymously submit or comment on any incident of discrimination, including cases of race, religion, size and class.

"The main goal of the website is to create awareness on race relations and use that as a source of momentum to effect a change," Brian Kirk '06, a Sustained Dialogue director, said.

One of the biggest problems in tackling the issue of race relations on campus, according to Kirk, is making people aware that a problem exists. The group hopes to illustrate the multiple issues of discrimination on campus through this collection of real-life experiences, he said.

Another purpose of the website is to initiate constructive debate on campus, said Siddhartha Gupta '04, a Sustained Dialogue director.

"There have been a lot of submissions and comments already and it's spurring dialogue," he said. "It's making people discuss what classifies as racism."

The moderators of the website are still concerned about how the website submissions should be filtered. Currently, an ad hoc committee from Sustained Dialogue looks at each submission and only censors material that may identify specific organizations or individuals.

"We only screened for explicit information about people and locations," Kirk said. "We don't want anything on this website to become accusatory — we just want to create awareness."

However, some visitors to the website were bothered by the quality of some of the submissions and are calling for stricter guidelines.

According to Gupta, a handful of the submissions contain questionable content that may be mocking the site's intentions instead of expressing legitimate concerns.

"It seems that it's taken a little less than a week for some goons to completely ruin the point of this site," one user wrote in response to the questionable submissions.

"I think having such a website might have merit but the excess of marginal incidents trivializes race relations on campus," another post read.

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According to Kirk, the group is not screening material based on relevance because it does not want to define what qualifies as discrimination.

"Where do we draw the line?" Gupta asked. "We don't want to tell people that we're not taking them seriously."

Although he said "questionable" content is not a major problem, Gupta added that the group understands the forum is a "living website and will be constantly updated."

Currently in its pilot stage, the site will remain accessible until the end of examinations. Afterwards, the site's administrators will review and modify it before relaunching it in the fall.

The directors of Sustained Dialogue say they are satisfied with the results so far and that overall, student feedback has been encouraging.

"It gives people who care about the issues a forum to discuss what is happening on campus," Sarah Forger '05 said. "It's valuable even if it just gets some discussion started."

Though the website has already surpassed 55,000 hits, Kirk and Gupta said they would like to see more people reading and posting.

"I want it to reach the people who aren't already aware of racism," Gupta said. "Just because we don't hear about all these small personal accounts on a day to day basis doesn't mean they don't exist."