Interview with Talin Keshishian

A UCLA student expressed interest in having an interview session with the founder, Talin Keshishian to discuss the topic of discrimination for his Sociology 320 course. Below is the interview, with minor editing.

Q: How old are you?

Twenty-four.

Q: Where were u born?

Lebanon.

Q: How long have you lived here in the United States?

About 16 years.

Q: So you lived in Lebanon for how many years then?

Eight years.

Q: How would you define the word discrimination?

I would classify discrimination as being the unfair treatment of any group.

Q: What are the first things that come to mind when someone mentions the word discrimination?

Lack of open-mindedness. Stereotypes.

Q: Do you ever consciously think about or contemplate this topic?

Yes, I do think about this topic everyday since I do have an organization that combats discrimination.

Q: What is the organization called?

Allied Cultures Against Discrimination.

Q: Have you had any early notions of discrimination whether towards you or something you witnessed, like something early on, any kind of discrimination yourself?

Yes, I’ve seen discrimination happen on campus with different groups and I have seen it addressed beforehand, before I started university.

Q: Do you have any specific examples, of something like your earliest notions of discrimination?

Discrimination against Armenians, for example, discrimination against Hispanics and also between the two, like at GrantHigh School when they had the rivalries between the Armenians and the Mexicans.

Q: Now when you say discrimination, what do you basically think of it as? Verbal abuse, or any kind of abuse?

I would say discrimination is all encompassing, it can be religious, and it can be sexist, age, sexual orientation, gender and ethnicity.

Q: Has the concept changed at all for you as you’ve grown up? Has it evolved what you’ve thought of as discrimination when you were younger, maybe until now?

I would say that early on, in my teen years, discrimination was something that I thought was a normal part of life, it couldn’t be dealt with, but now I don’t feel that because I see that there are ways to address this issue and to create a minimal amount of discrimination. I don’t think the problem is ever going to go away but I think we can minimize the impact it will have on people, be it victim or oppressor.

Q: How would you say your parents view the concept of discrimination?

I would say my parents view the concept of discrimination the way I used to when I used to when I was a teenager that it’s just a normal part of life that won’t go away and it’s just a part of how people act.

Q: Have they ever really discussed discrimination or something specifically that has happened in the news? Have they ever addressed it to you or talked about it generally?

It’s not a general topic between my parents towards me but I have discussed it with them. I have initiated the conversation myself regarding discrimination.

Q: And how have those conversations mainly been? How have they reacted to it?

I believe it has created a little bit of a barrier in terms of how I feel about it compared to how they feel about it. They seem it as something that is not going away, it’s a normal part of life and I see the different methods there so that we can adjust this issue towards having a solution because it is a sociological problem and I do believe that there are ways to work around it.

Q: So you are saying that there is still some sort of divide between certain views you hold and certain views they hold?

Yes, they’re very traditional in their views; I feel I am more modern and a bit more impacting towards where we are shifting at, towards the 21st Century.

Q: Alright, evident from what you’ve been telling me, that there definitely was, as one of the previous questions addressed, a shift in your views. When do you think it exactly happened? Was it after you graduated? Was there a specific year in college? Do you know if there was a particular thing that changed you?

Yes, it was during college when I was taking a couple of courses with one professor. He taught a Sociology class at CSUN titled “Ethnic Diversity in America”. It started with that class and I took a couple of more courses with him which further explained the original concepts learned in the first class and after that he pushed me towards getting more involved in the topic of discrimination, how it affected people, sociologically, morally, things of that sort. One circumstance that led me to start the nonprofit organization against discrimination was when he had a class session and he was talking about homosexuals and he began to speak about how Armenians feel towards this topic, because there were a few Armenians in the class, including me, and after the class I went to speak with him. He said that one day someone is going to stand up and say to all Armenians that this isn’t good, we should be more open minded about homosexuals and more tolerant of accepting them into the community, and he looked at me and said “maybe that person will be you.” So that propelled me into wanting to pursue this avenue into a career and eventually led to this nonprofit organization being created.

Q: Have you had any experience firsthand or otherwise that conveys to you the views of discrimination of your culture, like when you were saying how your parents view discrimination. Do you see that same kind of view through your whole culture? Tell me about your culture and some kind of view that they hold, according to you.

I believe that discrimination goes beyond all groups, it’s all encompassing. If you have different races, you will have racism. You’ll have stereotypes. It’s a given. What we try to do is we try to minimize these stereotypes, try to find out alternatives to it and work towards combating them that way.

I guess something else I was trying to discuss with you was what do you see as the general Armenian view towards discrimination? Have you ever experienced firsthand the discrimination Armenians might have committed, or that have been committed against Armenians? Like your experiences with that personally, or people you know, that you’ve heard firsthand or secondhand. Like what views did Armenians hold about this topic?

I think I am the rarity in my culture about how people perceive discrimination and its problem. I believe that I’m one of the few who actually thinks this is something worth discussing. When I tell Armenians that I have an organization like this, their responses are usually met with something like “why? It’s not necessary. We don’t have a problem like we did during the times of Martin Luther King, Jr.” but everyone creates stereotypes and pre-conceived notions about other people so we might not have the racism that we did in the 1960s but I do believe that we have a lot of subtle racism and subtle discrimination that takes place now, among all groups. So, I believe that that’s what I am trying to conquer. It might not be the direct racism, hate crimes and that sort, but its subtle discrimination, preconceived notions about how others act, especially if you’re in the minority groups. Let’s say you meet a few people, and you’ve never usually associated with their ethnic group before. You would possibly assume that however they act, their culture, their tradition, their beliefs encompasses the whole minority. But that might not always be the case. Creating notions just like that, based solely on meeting a few people, is not a healthy way of trying to understand people or learn diversity.

Q: So now you said you and your family moved here when you were 8. So your parents have been here for 16 years. And were they born both in Lebanon?

Yes they were both born in Lebanon.

Q: And they spend just about all of their lives in Lebanon before they came here?

Right.

Q: Do you have any memories or any exposure, any type of discrimination, something you might not have understood at the time, but if you looked back at your childhood, do you think they’re might have been any instances where you encountered discrimination or heard your parents talk about it before you moved to America. How do you think discrimination was in Lebanon?

Well, I’m going to be speaking from the point of how I perceive it now, because my memory from back then isn’t very strong. I would perceive it now as being the Armenians in Lebanon were a small minority. They were the unwanted Christian minority living in Lebanon after they fled Armenia from the Genocide and their views were not very much equally expressed and portrayed in Lebanon. So I believe that we were the minority there, as we are here. That does create a little bit of discrimination because first of all you’re not Arab, you’re not Muslim which is the majority of the religious preference there. So that would create a little bit of discrimination in terms of how were viewed among the whole country of Lebanon.

Q: Have you ever felt pressure by friends or other acquaintances to compromise your beliefs and actions? Have you ever been with friends and they said something that you didn’t believe in and you felt pressure to coalesce with their views?

Sure, it has happened a number of times. For example I was at a friend’s gathering a few weeks ago, and one person that I had just met, decided to share some racist jokes. And a close friend of mine was looking at me and making eye contact, knowing that it was going to affect me. I didn’t say anything, but everyone knew from my expression and from how I got up and left that I wasn’t thrilled with the fact that they were exchanging racist banter so casually. I have handled it a little bit more directly in the past but I choose my battles in terms of this, because some people like friends if they say anything, and usually they won’t, but if they have ever said anything that I find offensive, racially or of that sort, I would say something. Now this doesn’t compromise my beliefs on this issue.

Q: So you mentioned before that you started a nonprofit organization. Can you tell me more about that?

Sure, the organization is called “Allied Cultures Against Discrimination. It was incorporated in January of 2006. It has 4 programs set up to work with individuals as well as schools for diversity training. One of our programs is centered on providing a seminar/group for people who are interested in discussing diversity and racism in an open forum through a safe medium where people can express their views. We are looking to start that program as soon as possible with funding. We have two programs that will work with schools. One of them is with public schools and the other is with Armenian schools. The other program is Knowledge for College group. That one will introduce college life and everything that will be encompassing everything about the college experience, diversity, cultural shock. Everything I personally encountered when I entered an institute of higher learning.

Q: These are all things you want to tackle with the organization?

Yes, these are 4 parts of the organization that we seek to make work.

Q: And so you are in the process of getting funding for these programs?

Yes, we are in the process of raising money to get these programs started.

Q: So your organization’s name is Allied Cultures Against Discrimination. We have been talking about the general term and topic of discrimination and I’ve kind of dealt into one of the first questions I was asking, but I want to nit pick a little more about the word discrimination. I mean it’s so broad. When you talk about discrimination for your organization, what exactly do you aim to tackle? What exactly does discrimination mean in that title?

Well, this goes back to when we first started the organization. It was only meant to work with Armenian schools. We had only 1 program set up – it was supposed to provide diversity training to Armenian schools. Back then the name of the organization was “Armenian Committee Against Discrimination.” But we realized that we didn’t want to just limit ourselves in that sense. We wanted to provide diversity training to all different groups through different avenues than just through the Armenian school system. So that’s why we changed the name of the charity. Going back to what I said earlier in this interview, discrimination can be either religious, age discrimination, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic discrimination, every aspect that shows unfairness and unethical treatment of a specific group.

Q: What would you consider acts of discrimination? What are you trying to prevent or stop? Is it mostly verbal discrimination? I know you said that our society has more subtle forms of discrimination. Can you give me examples of what you think would be subtle racism?

For example, in 2007 there was a reporter who lost his job against a women’s basketball team. That is something we seek to handle. Subtle racism is like creating stereotypes. Having stereotypes passed on. Let’s say a friend says something about a group, and you’ve never met that group or know anything about that group. You create this notion in your head that whatever your friend has passed on to you is something legitimate and true. It might not be valid. You need to find out for yourself. What we seek to do is to try to get people to address these forms of discrimination. Racial epithets, stereotypes, addressing hate crimes, things of that sort. We try to get these things out in the open and try to figure out how they got embedded into them. At an early age, through a friend, through something read or heard. Every little thing. There’s so many ways how these notions become embedded into people and becomes their idea of reality, their idea of truth and we seek to work on combating that.

Q: So you mentioned the 4 different areas that your organization tries to tackle. Can you just tell me the general subtopics of each one?

Sure. One of them was open forum. They are meetings that introduce the ideas of diversity, racism, stereotypes, hate crimes. So people can feel free to express their views on it.

Q: Ok. And these are something that you plan to instill or are they in effect already?

They are not in effect yet but we will be soon introducing them to the public.

Q: Ok, but if and when they do come in effect, where do you suppose you will have these meetings? Like college campuses? What kinds of people would you want to participate in this?

In this program particularly, we are open to all age groups, all different kinds of people. That is what adds to the richness and diversity of it. It makes it more effective if you have different kinds of people. In the future, once we have it settled, we’d like to separate it into groups, based on categories of age, issues on diversity, another group on general racism, another group on how racism has affected them, things of that sort. Divide and conquer technically.

Q: Ok. So one of your programs was the open forum. Can you tell me about the other 3?

Two of the other three were providing diversity training to schools. One was private schools, mainly private Armenian schools and the other was public schools, all around California. And the third one was providing one day orientation seminar on college campuses for new students. It was going to provide students up to 3 of their college applications paid for so as to get a better handle on having more choices and options for getting into universities. We were able to do this in the later part of 2007, providing a college application reward to a graduating high school student.

Q: For the second one, were you talking more so about high schools or college?

The private Armenian program will work with elementary school up to high school. The public school program works with kindergarten all the way up to high school. So we will have different levels of how these diversity training programs will be taught because you can’t teach the same method to a kindergartner as you can to a graduating high school student.

Q: Now I think we discussed before how these kinds of issues became prominent in your college years, eventually turning into your career passion. I know we haven’t touched on your high school experiences. What kind of high school did you go to?

I went to a private Armenian high school.

Q: So these are the kind of high schools you want to specifically target?

Yes, I believe that going to an Armenian school in general provides you the framework to limit your experiences as everything in your social circle is just Armenian. I would have a similar response for any centrally based, ethnically exclusive school. At home we spoke Armenian. In school it was Armenian. When I moved onto college, and found myself as part of a campus with 35,000 people, it was after I graduated with a class of 56. It was difficult to adjust. There was a lot of culture shock, meeting different people, learning how to fit the mold of the minorities that encompassed the very diverse campus. It took a while for me to feel at home at the university. I didn’t want the transition for other Armenian students graduating and moving on to college, moving onto real jobs, to be difficult. What we try to do with this program is to make the transition a lot easier.

Q: Obviously you are more in touch with this issue than most people would be because you are actively participating in it and bringing it into light. With your organization, you have a positive attitude in thinking about the topic of discrimination. Do you think discrimination is something that has a solution, however ideological or theoretical it might be? Or do you think it’s inevitable – part of human nature?

It ties in with racism. It’s a sociological problem. We understand that this issue is not going to absolve itself. So we try to minimize it as best as we could to get people to understand it. Now we have shifted racism from the 1960s, it’s more subtle and less indirect. So right now we are looking to shift from subtle racism onto something less impacting. So people are free and not so quick to grab onto an idea and make it their own. They are not brainwashed so to say in terms of how they categorize. It’s only natural to categorize but their has to be limits to categorizing everything around you. That is what the organization seeks to do.

Q: We were talking before that you mention your organization to others and they ask you “why?” Is that the overall response you hear when you mention to people that you created this charity? What is the consensus and their reaction to it?

It kind of shifts in both directions. I would say it’s neutral at this point. I had one incorporating agent who we were interested in working with. She asked me why I wanted to do this because the problem is not as pervasive as it once was. There are a lot of people who feel that this is not worth pursuing or something that will actually go anywhere (such as minimize the problem of racism). But on the other hand, there are people who believe in this cause. There are people like me who feel this is a problem that needs to be addressed and having an organization that seeks to bring to light all of this information is a good thing.

Q: Well I think that does it for the interview questions. Thank you for your participation and insight.

Thank you.