The crises and opportunities of racial equality and relations in an increasingly global world were topics of discussion in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union on Monday night.

Farai Chideya, a multimedia journalist who has worked for National Public Radio and ABC News and author of such books as “Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans and The Color of Future,” spoke about how ISU students can use their experiences with people of other backgrounds to prepare the world for a more equitable future.

Chideya used her black aunt and white uncle, who met on the ISU campus and married, as an example of racial acceptance throughout her speech.

She said her family had to go through a “period of [personal] negotiation” when her aunt and uncle married, but having that experience growing up had helped her understand the world around her, she said. Chideya likened that experience to the one the United States is going through currently, with turbulent immigration questions facing the nation.

“I think that America is going through a period of introducing ourselves to ourselves,” she said. “I believe that internally, we are having to deal with the Internet, immigration and the media.”

The way we group ourselves in “sets” when we are young also poses problems to racial equality, she said.

“Crisis and opportunity mean the same thing in Chinese,” she said, so the future of racial equality in America and the world rest in the hands of those who are taking the opportunity to “globalize” themselves in certain environments, like on college campuses.

Interpersonal racial gaps are closed, she said, when jokes and comments, which might otherwise be considered “offensive,” can be laughed off within interracial friendships and when interracial marriages have created “bridges of intimacy.”

“It is in that moment when you cross a line and then are able to pull back is where a relationship is defined,” she said. “Can you make up? Can you recover? I think people these days are too afraid to test the boundaries of their relationships. People have a sense that everything [can be] fatal.”

Chideya also said learning from the history of money and the power that changed the American landscape is how one can truly begin to understand how the imprint of slavery has defined the world.

Once you understand the history of power and money, she said, operating in a global world in the “terms of negotiation” can ease interracial exchanges.

“Synthesize the knowledge of the past so that you can act in the present and prepare for the future,” she said. “If you can’t master living in a diverse America, how can anyone else?”

Those in attendance found Chideya’s message to students on college campuses to be useful.

“Synthesizing the past was an excellent way of to put it,” said Tameka Greene, vice president of the Black Student Alliance and senior in art and design. “I think where students miss out is how important the past is to us to make the present.”