I’ve benefited tremendously from diversity throughout my life. I grew up in one town, a relatively affluent suburb of a city that had seen its share of racial conflict. Most of the kids in my Kindergarten class ended up graduating high school with me, and 98% of us went on to college. While my school classes growing up were mostly white, I’d estimate that my classes in school were 80% white, 15% asian and 5% black. Regardless of race, all of my classmate grew up in the same subdivisions, had parents with corporate jobs and had roughly the same experiences that I did. When you're a kid you don't think about racial diversity as much. I remember thinking that the white kid who moved into my neighborhood from Alabama was way more different than me than the black kid who lived in the next subdivision over and also loved the Lions.
It wasn’t until 7th grade when I became friends with Sagar who had just immigrated from India that I really knew someone with a vastly different upbringing than myself. As most would kids do, I peppered him with questions about what life was like in India. I'm sure some of my questions were ignorant, but through that friendship I learned about him, India and Hinduism. I've carried the benefit of that throughout my life whenever I've met someone from India.
When I was 15, I decided that I wanted to get a job. Some of my friends had jobs and I wanted some extra money beyond my allowance. My friend Kyle worked at a Quiznos Sub shop and put in a good word for me and got me a job. The staff there was about half high-school kids and half the type of people who had a career in fast food. The assistant manager was from the indigent suburb next to mine. She drove a beater, chain smoked and lived in a trailer. The manager and franchisee was a gay man who was worldly, smart, funny, and I can't leave out handsome. He encouraged me to go out and experience the world and not end up like Ryan, who had graduated from my high school 8 years earlier and was still living at home and working at a sandwich shop. This was really my first foray into spending serious amounts of time with people from a vastly different background than my own, but again I took something away from this. Mostly an empathy for the assistant manager whose close mindedness I attributed to her lack of opportunities for education and a general frustration with her own place in life.
In college I got a job as a bus driver. Much like working at Quiznos, the staff was half students and half career bus drivers. But the other drivers now weren’t all people who grew up in the same few towns. My co-workers spanned ages, religions, races and sexual orientations. It wasn't uncommon for the conversations in the break rooms to be about race or sexuality, and I took much away from this as well.
But nothing expanded my worldview as much as the course I took my senior year called Intergroup Dialog. The point of Intergroup Dialog was to split up into groups of 10-12 students and meet each week to have a very deep discussion – typically about race, gender, or sexuality. The groups were divided up to be as diverse as possible across many different areas like religion, race, urban/rural/suburban, poor/wealthy. It was eye-opening to hear kids who grew up 10 miles from me in Detroit talk about how many of their high school classmates ended up getting shot or joining street gangs.
I think everyone in my group grew as a person during class, but none more so than a freshman who I'm pretty sure was named Kelly. Kelly had grown up in a tiny town in west Michigan. She was a petite blond girl, and in the cold months at the beginning of the winter semester she always wore her little silver cross necklace outside of her sweater. She was one of just a few kids from her graduating class to go to college. During conversations on race she was usually pretty quiet but eventually opened up near the end of the term.
She said that before taking this course she had never had a real conversation with a black person. Her only interaction with black people in her 19 years of life were as cashiers or as wait staff at restaurants. There were no black kids at her high school, and everyone she knew told her that she should be wary of black people and that they were dangerous. But as she had listened to the 4 black students in the group talk about their lives and experiences and as she got to know them she said that she realized that the things she had been told were wrong. She realized that the people back home who told her those things had probably never had a real conversation with a black person either. It was amazing to watch the fear that she had been conditioned with disappear over the course of the semester. All it took for her to change her views was getting forced to have a real conversation with someone different.
I was left wondering about all of her peers back home who didn’t go to college, and were likely going to spend their whole life on the same path she was on before taking this course. Those people will probably spend their whole life fearing people who are different and never getting the chance to have a conversation that could change that. And if that is the "liberal indoctrination" that some people accuse colleges of doing, I couldn't endorse it enough. I often think back to that course and I hope Kelly kept growing as a person.
I think being open to others and their life experiences has helped me tremendously throughout my career. When I worked for the Navy I worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds. The military really draws from a cross section of America, and even beyond. There are a surprising number of foreign born individuals in the Military, and working for the DoD. At one point my 7-person team had people born on 4 different continents. Being able to work successfully with people from different backgrounds and cultures is key, and the diversity of ideas and approaches to problems is a huge boon to the US Military.
One of the best bosses I ever had was a Commander who was a black man from Tennessee. His Naval career had taken him all over the world. I asked him what he thought he would be doing if he hadn't joined the Navy. He said that he assumed that like his siblings he would have stayed in his hometown and probably would have never left the country. If we had each decided to stay within our safety nets or where we grew up, we would have never met.
I sometimes reflect on how common it must be to miss out on that diversity, like Kelly almost did. I think it’s very easy to grow up in a homogenous town, go to a local college made up of kids mostly from similar towns, and then move to the nearest big city and work with people who all went to universities in the surrounding states and all look, talk, think and act just like them.
I also often think about Daryl Davis, and how through just befriending someone, he was able to convince them that their hate for him was misguided. All it takes is having a good conversation with someone different from you to grow into a more welcoming, better person. If it's that easy, shouldn't we all be doing it?
