Trick-or-treating, donning costumes and pumpkin carving are all common Halloween customs, but National Park College's Student Government Association has a different tradition.
The organization held its annual Smash the Bias Fall Carnival on the lawn of Student Commons Thursday.
"It began with us wanting to do a fun, fall event with pumpkins, and we started just kind of brainstorming on needs. It came from needs of students on campus who wanted to educate other people about implicit and explicit biases that they'd experienced," SGA faculty adviser and psychology professor Samantha Christian said.
To symbolically destroy such biases, they provided 40 pumpkins for students to write their issues and problems on, then smashed them with aluminum baseball bats.
"Students will write things that they've experienced throughout their lives, things that they're even angry with or upset with. We tend to have a lot of fun with it," Christian said.
"For example, on my pumpkin I always write 'dumb blonde.' Then we smash it, and it's a lot of fun. It's actually very cathartic to smash a pumpkin like that."
The group handed out fliers during the event, which defined bias as "prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another usually in a way considered to be unfair."
The fliers also encouraged students to improve their own awareness of explicit and implicit biases and educate themselves on the subject.
"The first step to overcoming unconscious bias is being aware of how implicit bias impacts everyday life. Understand how the brain works and become aware of how unconscious bias may impact our lives and be on alert for situations where unconscious bias may be present," the fliers stated.
"We want to educate students about implicit and explicit biases. The explicit is basically racism overtly. It is out there. They're not trying to cover it up. The implicit, we are not aware of. It's in decisions we make unconsciously," Christian said.
"I think it's important to get people collaborating and working and doing things and having fun together, and it just helps more people know more people. That's half the point of college: to get to know different people," SGA President Harris Felton said.
"We just want to make sure that people feel really included here on campus and that we recognize diversity and that we celebrate it," Christian said.
"We always just have a costume contest, and it's fun, but then everyone walks away with nothing other than just celebrating Halloween. With this, they get to take home something that will hopefully stick with them."
Local on 11/01/2019