University of diversity?

I love Columbia. I have said this many times to my friends, family and any other person who has asked me how college has been thus far. The reasons for my claim are infinite.  Coming to John Jay 15 was frightening, and although I was a little annoyed at first, I have come to love the people I call my floormates. It has come to the point where I feel I can have an honest conversation in our little penthouse about almost anything—and when I say anything, I mean it. During my first month at Columbia, one of my good friends here asked me why I only hung around black people. I was surprised not so much by the question itself as much as by the fact that my friend had the courage to ask me in the first place. I began to think about the question. Let me say that, first and foremost, John Jay 15 is black. It has come to everyone’s attention that our floor is predominantly made up of people of color, and by that I mean nonwhite. After thinking about the people I hung around with the most, I quickly realized that my closest friends at Columbia were black.

As I recalled the faces of my closest friends throughout my lifetime, I began to notice that they had all been people of color, except for the two close white friends I had until the age of 10. Their names were Jessica and Jillian, and we were as close as best friends could get. I wondered why I barely spoke to them now. They were both girls who lived in my building, and Jillian moved away when I was about 11. As I grew older, I was forced to learn more about who I was, and what that meant in society. I was born in the United States, but my parents were born in Eritrea, and being raised in that culture, I quickly identify with being Eritrean. I had seen what I had in common with my Eritrean friends and what I did not have in common with my white friends. I was coming on to something. I realized that the more aware I became of my race and my political and sociological position in society, the more distant I became with Jessica and Jillian. The distance that emerged between Jillian and I may have had something to do with her moving, although her visits were frequent. From then on, my best friends became three East African girls in my elementary school in fifth grade, and our friendship has continued to this day. I now recognize the continuum of close relationships I had with people of color from then on.

Although I have tried to build tight relationships with a variety of people at Columbia, I continue to wonder why my closest circle of friends has continued to be people of color. My conclusion was simple. We assume that we will have most in common with people that share the same race as us. For some reason, this just doesn’t sound right to me, although I will honestly admit to taking part in this somewhat inevitable phenomenon.

I have done no research on this trend and am speaking purely based on my personal experiences and observations. I feel that, as a student, teen, and human being, I operate purely out of convenience. By hanging out with people with whom you clearly have most in common, you eliminate possible areas of conflict, disagreements, and awkward moments, right? Yes, but I feel that most of us, including myself, forget about the most costly sacrifice in this type of friendship—the ability to learn. When you surround yourself with people most similar to you, you allow yourself to fall behind a peer who refuses to exercise an ethnocentric way of socializing. We are unable to know what may be right or wrong because we limit ourselves to only one view of morality. I fear we do not challenge ourselves socially. In our effort to eliminate more conflicts by hanging out with people most similar to us, we inevitably develop serious conflicts of interest when we face people who come from a different point of view, because we have conditioned ourselves to believe what we believe for so long that anything else seems wrong.

After allowing this to flash through my mind in the span of 30 seconds before answering my floormate’s question, I responded by asking why he only hung out with white people. He was silent, and I smiled. I couldn’t blame him. We were both guilty. We then went to Chipotle and joked around for the rest of the night. I love Columbia because of my ability to answer and ask questions like this with people who are so different from myself. I have realized that although convenience is easy, a challenge is fun.

The author is a first-year student in Columbia College.