Middle School students gathered in the Jeslo Harris Theater on Thursday, January 14 to watch and discuss four clips from ABC’s show “What Would You Do?” with John Quiñones. The clips focused on different issues of diversity: race, body image, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

“What Would You Do?” places actors in tense scenarios in order to test how witnesses of the scenes will react. In the first clip shown, a black woman is unjustly accused of shoplifting by a white store owner. In the second clip shown, three teenage girls hurl insults at an overweight woman sitting by herself on a public bench. In the third clip shown, an affectionate gay couple is harassed while a similarly affectionate heterosexual couple sits nearby in a bar. And in the fourth and final clip shown, two Mexican workers are denied service at a deli because they don’t speak English.

In all of these clips, witnesses are tested to see whether or not they say something about the prejudice they are seeing. In all but the last one, people spoke up, but not very often. After the clips, the students returned to their homebase classrooms to discuss what they had seen. Eleventh and twelfth grade students who represent affinity groups at Riverdale helped lead some of the discussion groups.

In Dwight Vidale’s sixth grade class, many of the students reported being disappointed, confused, angry, and upset by the way people reacted in the clips. They shared personal stories about similar incidents that they have witnessed and vowed to say something in the future.

Overall, the students learned that diversity is about more than just race, and that it is their responsibility to stand up for what's right.