By diana oh ‘24
I was around ten years old when I had my first hard encounter with racism. My mind was a clean slate back then. Raised in a safe international school with some diversity and little to no exposure to racism, I was completely naive and innocent of many aspects of the larger world, including discrimination. Obviously, I knew basic information about Social Justice in my history classes and through events on the news. However, it was a foreign problem outside my bubble, completely irrelevant to my life. Frankly, I did not even understand how racism was even possible. But looking back, I realize that having this mindset was one of the most ignorant things I could think about the world.
I opened my eyes to the unfair world around me when I went to a sports camp on Catalina Island camp in California. I was severely unprepared for the treatment I would encounter during my three weeks at the camp. Nothing was obvious. There was no physical violence involved, and everything was indirect. It ranged from cutting me off while talking, rolling their eyes when seeing me, and excluding me from team projects. I shook it off at first, unaware that I was being discriminated against. I tried to mingle with the white girls by acting like them and cracking jokes, but everything was useless. These little aggressions started becoming day-to-day, minute-to-minute acts of hatred, and soon I realized that it was not any of the intrinsic values that led to me being an outcast. It was my appearance. I was not white.
Obviously, these two weeks of constant isolation and discrimination left quite a heavy scar on 10-year-old me. What was supposed to be a relaxing and adventurous trip turned out to be more of a hellish experience, full of tears. What is worse, the scars and trauma I experienced carried on through everyday life and continue to this day. From that moment on, something as simple as a conversation with a white person made me very nervous and scared.
Even now to some degree, I am still scared to interact with white students or faculty because I am concerned that they will belittle me as a minority. During those two weeks at camp, I developed a barrier separating me from the white community. I formed a preconception that all white people would, and must think that they are, superior to me just because I was Asian, just because I was a minority. And maybe the early childhood memories are why I desperately wanted to fit in with the white friend groups at St. Mark’s. Because maybe by fitting in at St. Mark’s, I could fill the trauma that I felt during my time at the sports camp.
I know for a fact that this experience is similar to many minority students around the world. I also know that there are definitely a lot of racist people around the world who think we as minorities are inferior to them. However, not all white people are like that. There are many genuinely great white students that I met in school that break this stereotype. If I had conformed to my bubble and shut them out completely, I would have lost so many great friends that could not have been more relevant in my life to this day.
So for all minority students and faculty at St. Mark’s, I would like to ask them to do three following things for the sake of yourselves and the sake of the minorities at St. Mark’s:
Be confident, whoever you are with. It does not matter how scared or uncomfortable you feel around students that way. You have every right to be here at St. Mark’s to learn, interact and be in the same spaces as the white students. You are entitled to be here as much as any other person in the dorm.
Treat white students and faculty how you would treat your other minority students, and don’t form a barrier early on. There is an extremely large chance that the person that you are interacting with is not discriminatory at all, and rather just does not know you as a person. And if someone is truly discriminatory, report to a faculty member and seek help. That student is not worth your time or your efforts and they are certainly not worth the pain that you have gone through because of your race.
Last, your race is something to be proud of that you should confidently show to others. It ebbs with culture, and liveliness to it, that it is so valuable. Don’t ever be ashamed, because you don’t deserve to be. You deserve to be proud.