Students confronted the reality of privilege in mainstream society at Wednesday’s Tunnel of Oppression event in Talley Ballroom as part of this year’s Diversity Education Week: Revisited. 

A collaboration between many departments and student groups on campus, including the Counseling Center, the GLBT Center, the Women’s Center, the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, University Housing and Fraternity and Sorority Life, the event aimed to present an accurate representation of what marginalized groups experience on a day-to-day basis.   

The ballroom was sectioned off into a series of rooms set up as scenes where these issues often play out in a campus environment. 

The first room, a professor’s office, showed a transgender student who is in the process of transitioning and going through hormone therapy letting her professor know that she is struggling with depression and wants to get back on track in their course. 

However, instead of focusing on how to help the student with her studies, the professor initially attributes the student’s slumping grades and depression to her “disorder,” to which the student responds by saying that being transgender is not a disorder and that her depression comes from many other factors than just her transition. 

Angie Mullowney, who played the role of the transgender student and is transgender herself, said that the tunnel is a way to expose those who have not had to deal with discrimination or oppression to the experiences of those who have to deal with it every day.

“I’m not an actor but this is my first time doing something like this, stepping outside my comfort zone, but I feel very comfortable with the people working here and it’s definitely a fun experience,” said Mullowney, a sophomore studying women and gender studies.

The tunnel has been updated since last year to make the skits more relevant to the conversations that students are having day to day, as well as the issues that are affecting society at large, according to Renee Wells, director of the GLBT Center. 

“We really wanted to gear it towards what we wanted [students] to leave with an understanding of,” Wells said. “We have found based on the conversations and the feedback that we’ve gotten from students that they’ve really appreciated the opportunity to articulate what they’ve learned and what they got out of the experience.” 

This year’s tunnel addressed the issue of persecution of undocumented students for the first time in a skit. In the skit, two roommates meet the first time, and in getting to know one another, it is revealed that one of the roommates is not an American citizen. She tries to explain that her family left Mexico more than a decade ago to escape violence and find a better life which prompts the other roommate to accuse her and her family of taking American jobs, being a burden to society and eventually to report her saying, “You are not American.” 

The next skit addressed the issue of Islamophobia, which is particularly relevant to students on campus, due to last year’s Chapel Hill shooting where three Muslim students were executed and due to rhetoric coming out of the presidential election. The skit showed students rooting for Donald Trump as he called for a ban on Muslims entering the country while a Muslim student overheard them. 

Wells said that sexual violence is always a part of the tunnel because it is so prevalent on college campuses, but this year they wanted to take it in a different direction from the previous year. 

“This year we wanted to do more of an interpersonal thing on the way that peers respond and are oppressive toward survivors,” Wells said.

The scene involved a group of friends who got angry at a female student for accusing another student of sexually assaulting her. A male student berates her, calling her a slut and accusing her of trying to deliberately ruin his reputation because she was angry with him. 

Jacob Shoemaker, a freshman studying chemistry who acted in the scene, said that even though these topics are uncomfortable to talk about, they are important to portray for people. 

“I think the tunnel is a very selfless and very productive thing because a lot of people hear about these things, but they’ve never seen it happen so they might not realize that it’s happening, and it’s good to know what examples might look like so they can try and help out or stop it in the future,” Shoemaker said.