Karachi vs. Kansas: Bubbles and boxes

Faryal (F): I remember coming to Tufts and thinking it was so diverse (whatever that means). When I expressed this excitement to some fellow peers, however, I was promptly corrected and told that Tufts was, in fact, not diverse at all. For me, it was all relative. I’m the Kansas part of this column, and as you can imagine, Kansas is not the most diverse place in the world. I grew up as one of a handful of brown people in my entire school. Especially when I was younger, seeing a brown person around town was a pleasant but rare surprise. I had my worlds compartmentalized: my brown friends and my school (read: white) friends.

Natasha (N): Same for me. Just being home for Thanksgiving brought back the strangeness of being the only person of color in a space — something that was completely revolutionized for me when I went to college. My shift between college and high school, however, wasn’t centered around challenging previous categorization. Rather, I started to rethink what I perceived as “normal.”

F: When I came to Tufts, my worldview began to shift. I started to see other examples of how people tore down these walls of separation that I had artificially built. It was helpful for me to see the lack of friend categorization modeled by people who came from different backgrounds. At Tufts, I don’t feel like I need to have my brown friends and my “school” friends, because now they are one and the same.

N: For me, instead of creating compartments for my Tufts friends, I started to challenge how I categorized myself. I went to a school where I thought it was normal to be suddenly called on whenever South Asia or Islam came up in class or be jokingly referred to as an international student. These things would make me uncomfortable, but I didn’t know how to confront the issue because I thought it was normal and okay. When teachers would go around asking what type of Christmas tree everyone had, I found myself having to lie in order to not attract questioning stares. When going between home and school every day, I was also going between my two spheres of normal.

F: I have to admit, it’s been hard to shake this categorization of the people in my life since I feel like I’ve been subconsciously trained to do it since I was so little. There are some places where I still feel like I need to categorize myself in a certain way. For example, my sorority is predominantly white, and I am still one of only a handful of people of color. My mental categorization sometimes now goes: “my sorority friends vs. my brown friends.”

N: What’s difficult about growing up in places where diversity isn’t the norm is that we’re forced to either compartmentalize ourselves or the people around us and operate in different bubbles. For so long, we drew our personas from our surroundings instead of building ourselves up from a collection of experiences. We’re still working on merging and popping these bubbles.