A hush fell over the crowd of more than 100 UI students as they stood and turned to face the altar in Old Brick.
Suddenly, hip-hop music drowned out the sound of rain on stained glass as UI junior Hai Tran launched himself onto the wooden platform, clapping and spinning into a frenzy of break-dance moves.
Tran is part of the hip-hop group UI Breakers, which performed at this year’s Community of Color event on Thursday evening along with the all-male a capella choir Intersection.
The biannual event, organized by the UI Center for Diversity and Enrichment, brought in performers for the first time in the event’s four-year history in order to “jazz it up a little,” said Andy Freeman, the coordinator of academic planning with UI Support Service Programs.
But Tran said his group’s performance connected on a deeper level with the event, which aimed to bring in students from all ethnicities to socialize.
“There’s all this diversity here, and we’re a diverse group too,” Tran said. “It’s like a mashing of communities together.”
The three-hour celebration, which included music, food and door prizes, draws in roughly 300 students from all different backgrounds every year, Freeman said.
The variety of people is what most impressed UI sophomore and transfer student Stephenie Orte — that, and the free food.
“[This event] is definitely better than going to the study rooms and watching the cliques of all the Barbie blondes with all the same hair and all the same height walking by,” Orte said in between bites of a monstrous Rice Krispie treat, surveying the crowd. “I like to see all different people. It’s not a set group.”
In addition to diversity, students said they enjoyed the laid-back atmosphere, something Freeman said he guarantees by excluding speeches or lengthy presentations.
“We are lectured to in class all day long,” Orte said. “I don’t want to listen to speeches.”
For Allison Love, a sophomore who was invited by a friend, the celebration was not what she had anticipated.
“With the name, I expected to be the only ‘caucasian,’ ” Love said. “But I was pleasantly surprised to see people of all different ethnicities.”
Freeman acknowledged as much; the event’s name is something of a misnomer, he said. Although the goal is to bring minority students together, he stressed white students are welcome.
The music died as the evening died down, and around 6 p.m., the pastel plastic table cloths were rumpled and the once piled-high food trays emptied.
But the room was still full, the students still there. They wandered between the tables, jumping into hugs or shouting across the room to old friends before shaking the hand of someone new.