Daley quoted in Sun Journal coverage of Stand Against Racism in Lewiston

Kirsten Daley of the University of Maine’s Office of Multicultural Student Life was quoted in a Sun Journal article about the seventh annual Stand Against Racism event held at the Lewiston YWCA. This year’s theme was “overcoming adversity,” and a panel of three women told their stories about the challenges they have faced and how they were able to overcome them, according to the article. Daley said she has a white mother and a black father, but her father’s family was not involved in her life, and she grew up in “an all-white community” in Aroostook County. It was not until she moved to Los Angeles for a short time and found herself scared of others that she realized the impact the culture in which she was raised had on her, the article states. “The culture I grew up in gave me a predisposition to racism,” she said, citing a lack of black television heroes but an abundance of black criminals. “Bias isn’t this thing we make up to blame people for our problems,” Daley said. “We’re not saying you can’t say a person is black or you can’t talk to black people. This is a real, cultural thing that we’re trying to change, and without talking about bias and discussing bias, it’s never going to change.”