BY MARY PRAGER

In print | Published November 6, 2008

“Would you date me?” The MULTi dating discussion on Oct. 30 posed this question within the context of multi relationships and various complicated issues including exotification, fetish-izing the other and objectification. MULTi, the student affinity group for those who self-identify as multi-racial, -ethnic, -socioeconomic or -religious, etc., hosts the discussion each semester. Roughly 30 people attended this semester, filling up Parrish’s west parlor.

Kavita Hardy ’09 and May Maani ’09 co-facilitated the discussion, which, according to Hardy, is one of the most successful of MULTi’s events and usually draws a large audience. “We hold this conversation on multi dating every year because we feel that it’s something that a lot of students can relate to,” Hardy said.

This year, unlike last year, the facilitators focused on integrating different types of diversity — socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, religious — and tried to make a smooth transition between them, Hardy said.

Students of all four class years attended the discussion for various reasons. “I’m in a multi relationship, and we wanted to see how other multi relationships function, and whether we could provide proof that multi relationships can work,” Adam Chuong ’12 said. While Chuong is not a member of MULTi, he attended an information meeting during Ride the Tide.
Hardy noted that the discussion was particularly illuminating for those new to the discourses of multi relationships. “For the freshmen especially, who I talked to, they felt like this sort of opened their eyes to a new way of looking at their relationships — not just their intimate relationships, but other relationships,” she said.

G Patrick ’10 attended the discussion in part because he wanted to learn more about others’ experiences with exotification. “I don’t find … exotification to be as much as an issue as apparently other people do, and I wanted to figure out what the problem was,” Patrick said.

Throughout the discussion, students brought up experiences and elements of their relationships that were at times reassuring, illuminating and disappointing.

“One student commented that his multi relationship had received, in my mind, surprising amounts of negative comments, which is something that surprised me because I hold our community to a higher standard than that, and I was quite hurt to know that … a fellow student’s relationship had not been accepted by the community,” Hardy said.

Patrick felt similarly. “What I thought was compelling was how even though we’re at Swat, sometimes there is this feeling of people looking at multiracial couples and not seeing them as just another couple, but as an interracial couple,” Patrick said. “People do look at them and objectify them.”

“There were some more positive comments, too, [from] students who had experienced relationships between two people of color coming together … and how their relationship differed from a relationship between a person of color and a person not of color,” Hardy said.

“It’s certainly not the only discussion about racial interactions that should occur,” she said, “because there are students that don’t relate to relationships, which was a concern raised during the discussion.”

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