Forget the Sea of Same, Give Me the Melting Pot
College introduced me to the power of diversity
Growing up in the suburbs of Oklahoma, diversity rarely crossed my mind.
My earliest memories of church preschool, kindergarten, and the neighborhood are devoid of any skin color except white. It was what it was. I didn’t know anything else.
After my parents divorced, Mom moved us to a big city in Texas. At the age of seven, I suddenly found myself in a community of mixed races and ethnicities.
Like most kids, however, I was unphased by the skin color and accents of my new neighbors. They were my friends and classmates, plain and simple. Who cared if they looked or sounded different?
Things changed a few years later when my sister and I returned to Oklahoma to live with our father. A single dad with two daughters, he moved us to the suburbs.
There I transitioned from elementary to middle school in classrooms once again devoid of color.
It wasn’t until high school, when the students from our town collectively merged into one building, that the sea of sameness struck me. And only then because of an off-hand remark uttered by my lab partner about being one of two black students in the entire school.
