Penn State students discussed motivation for entering race dialogues after watching a video featuring Sam Richards, senior lecturer in sociology.

The 20-minute video showed Richards speaking about the state of race relations in the United States.

Several students explained reasons why Penn State students do not speak out against racism after viewing the tape.

"It's a lack of time," Jimmy Tran (senior-biology) said.

Malena Vinocur (senior-psychology and anthopology) said students are too busy to place emphasis on race dialogues.

"Penn State is so apathetic about all these things," Vinocur said.

The students were asked what would make them become involved in a race dialogue, such as defending a certain person or group of people.

"There's a lot of different levels you can take it to if it concerns you," Dana Spadotto (junior-international politics and history) said.

Another student said a gut feeling would tell him if something was wrong with a situation, and then he would then get involved.

"It has to be close enough that I'm able to speak about the situation," Jason Lally (sophomore-information sciences and technology) said.

The event was not supposed to make participants think in certain ways, but was meant to get them to widen their perspectives, Richards said in the video.

His sentiments were echoed by one of the facilitators.

"We're not trying to get you to adopt a certain view," Jess Umlauf (senior-behavioral sciences) said.

The Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity, the College of the Liberal Arts and the sociology department sponsored the event.

Facilitators hope to show the video to other groups later this semester.

At the end of the discussion, some students said they would initiate internal changes before trying to change the world.

"We can sit here and talk about this forever," Maurel Merette (senior-history) said. "My role is to change myself and go from there."