Description of the video:

My name is Yassmin Fashir. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana for the earlier part of my life, and Indianapolis for the latter. I'm an undergrad here at IU, freshman. I'm studying International Studies, French and Arabic. And I'm part of EIDC, which is Eigenmann International Diversity Council, and African Student Association. I think that I might have been around six years old, and my mom and I went shopping. And while we were on the road driving, I think we were pulling into a parking lot and some guy -- I don't know what my mom might have done or what he might have done, but he rolled down his window and started to yell at my mom. And he said, like, go back to like Iran. And I didn't really understand that because we're African, but I guess it was because we're Muslim. There was a lady, and she was putting her bags in the cart, and she was like yelling him, telling him that was not okay. And she started comforting my mom and telling her, like, well, America's not like this, and that was just this one guy, and he was angry, and he didn't know what he was talking about. By her doing that, it really reassured me that, I mean, they're not -- it's not necessarily us that they're yelling at. It's their perception or what they think about us. When I was in France, I lived with my host family. I had a host sister and a host mom. And one of the things that happened was they asked me a question, and I responded, but what I responded was "my girlfriend" when I didn't mean that. And so, for about like two or three weeks, my host family thought that I was gay. And so they had like this gay pride flag, and they were like, we're totally okay with like gay people here. And for the longest time, I just though, well, these people are really open and, like, I'm very liberal. And I was like, well, is someone here gay? I don't, I don't understand. And we went shopping one afternoon, and they showed me a shirt, and they said, this would look really good on your girlfriend. And I said -- this was after like I learned French and I was like, I was learning more as I went on -- and I was like I don't have a girlfriend. And they started laughing, and they said that they thought I was gay. And so even then, they were really, really inclusive and how they treated me. And I just, I felt, I don't know. I felt really good after that.

Is there anything that you've done or that you've done here at IU to kind of approach making IU-Bloomington a great place for everyone?

Whenever I see anything that's not okay, whenever I hear something that's offensive to anybody -- it doesn't have to particularly be towards me -- I like to shut that down automatically and tell them why that's not okay and have them kind of reflect on that. Because when they do, then they think twice about saying it again. I would love to be that bridge to bring together two different people, two different identities, into one single like thing that they share.