Category — MMelore

As a lowly white male living in the most diverse borough, in one of the most diverse cities, I have often felt isolated from my more culturally defined peers. I have never left the country, and when someone asks me what race I am there is an awkward pause, until finally I proclaim, with very little pride, “I am white.”

I’m supposed to be Catholic and I guess my ancestry means that I’m mostly Italian. The problem is that I haven’t been to church in at least five years and the closest thing to Italy I’ve seen is the inside of a pizzeria. I don’t want to pretend I’m something I’m not and I’m definitely no Roman Catholic Italian. Everyone seems to be so interesting and unique, culturally at least, what happened to me?

I guess I blame it on the fact that I can only speak one, not so exclusive, language. I always wanted to speak a sexy language, or maybe one of those cool languages. Walking around Baruch and seeing all the different groups speaking in their own languages makes me feel jealous, to me it seems like everyone is part of small, super secret clubs bonded by uniquely shared sounds. I want to join! It’s not all bad news though, I get to participate in a much larger club, making friends with people from various cultures and adjusting my own cultural identity along the way.

This weekend my family and I dropped my sister, Sarah, off at The University of Connecticut, where she would be attending college for the next four years. It turns out that for the past two weeks it has been known to us that Sarah would be dorming with an Indian roommate that grew up in a small town outside of Hartford.

I was excited about sharing the cultural “encounter” between my sister and her roommate before it even happened, I was expecting some serious juxtaposition. My sister, for lack of a better phrase is a wild child. She’s a social butterfly. To put it bluntly, she likes to party. My sister was afraid that her new roommate would be shy, dare I say, even introverted after growing up in a small town and influenced by a more reserved culture, than say Queens NY. When my sister addressed her concerns to me I told her that she was just stereotyping and that you can’t judge a person until you meet them, but in my head I couldn’t help but imagine the cultural gap that might divide my sister from her new roommate.

When the inescapable encounter finally occurred it was more or less uneventful. Each set of parents frantically made sure their daughters had everything they needed before the two young women were inevitably left with only each other. It wasn’t their differences that I saw, rather, it was the bond between them as they entered into a brave new world (college).

If you want your post to show up in this category, be sure to check this category before publishing.