On progressing to a truly diverse society

About what’s going on in the past week, I just want to share a few paragraphs from Michelle Obama’s Becoming, on her college experience as a student of color, struggling to fit in a predominantly white campus. It resonated with me deeply.

“I imagine that the administrators at Princeton didn't love the fact that students of color largely stuck together. The hope was that all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony. It is a worthy goal. But even today, with white students continuing to outnumber students of color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it's a lot to ask.

At Princeton, I needed my black friends. We provided one another relief and support. So many of us arrived at college not even aware of what our disadvantages were. It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else.

This is doable, of course - minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time - but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.

My two roommates in Pyne Hall were both perfectly nice, but I wasn’t around the dorm enough to strike up any sort of deep friendship. I didn’t, in fact, have many white friends at all. In retrospect, I realize that it was my fault as much as anyone’s. I was cautious. I stuck to what I knew. It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging - the subtle cues that tell you not to risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.”

What she described was life from decades ago. However, the wish that “all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony“ still hasn’t come true yet in today’s world. Take a look at a typical college campus, for example. Even now, we still see sororities and fraternities being predominantly white, and many students of color hanging out together in their own groups.

Why, do you think, this is the case? What is making people like young Michelle Obama pick up “the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging?” I do think social stigma and racial stereotypes somehow play a part. These subtle cues are being drilled into us so deeply that even the most well-intended people are affected by them, driving us to put much more weight on race than we should be, and preventing us from concentrating on the things that actually matter - integrity, curiosity, diligence, aspiration.

To quote blogger Joanna Goddard, our first step is to realize that we all have a certain degree of prejudice - views we absorbed from our society and may not even realize we hold. And our commitment as anti-racist is to identify and dismantle these prejudice within ourselves. I think the movement that we’re all experiencing right now is a great way to re-evaluate our approach, and branch out to others that only seem different from us from the outside. Look past race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and think about what makes us all the same - humanity.

Lastly, some great sources of learning: this post, this video and Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test.