The Hewitt Times

It’s New York Music World, and it’s time for me to present my project. This entails reading a list of Spanish songs…I hate this part. I hesitantly mumble their titles. My friends start to giggle as my Spanish accent becomes obvious. I cringe; I’m left at the front of the classroom feeling like the odd girl out.

A New York Times article, Admitted but Left Out, shines a light on that memory. In a nutshell, the article depicts the struggle of being a minority student in an elite New York City private school. Supposedly, students who enter ‘the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite’ from programs like Prep for Prep often face abandonment from their neighborhood friends. One student (quoted in that article) reports that her friends at home called her an Oreo, “black on the outside, and white on the inside.” In a desperate attempt to be less lonely, she tried to be “blacker” when she was home, changing the way she talked and the kind of music she listened to.

So how does this relate to the seemingly unimportant story I mentioned?  I don’t face nearly as many challenges as do the students quoted in the New York Times, but I do struggle to balance American and Hispanic customs and to find my way through what has become a cultural maze.

As Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, once said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” There are two lessons to take away from this quote. The obvious one is that people are not adept to judge someone’s behavior until they have “stepped in to that person’s shoes”…or rather, skin. The other interpretation, the way I see it, is that people never really challenge their own perceptions of normalcy, regardless of how many cultures and traditions they have studied in textbooks. In other words, “different” and “weird” are eternally synonymous. People consider those who don’t share the same beliefs/customs to be “different” (in all of its negative connotation) because people don’t have enough “real world” exposure to be able to understand and appreciate cultures other than their own.  As a Hispanic student, I have experienced this cultural apathy first-hand. It is not something to which I like to subject myself. As a result, I feel the need to conceal my Spanish accent when I know that the class’ eyes and ears are all on me.

It’s not that I’m insecure about my ethnicity, but I dislike the idea of people singling me out as a Hispanic–or as anyone “different” for that matter. Categorization comes with a sense of isolation. It’s not that my friends don’t accept me, but I can still be ‘accepted’ while standing alone. My accent immediately blurs what unites me to everyone else, and it draws a distinctive line between me, the outlier on the scatterplot, and those who huddle closely around the line of best fit.

Although I am still not convinced that the sense of desolation ever truly goes away, I have come to terms with how people have categorized me. It is the unfortunate nature of us humans to sometimes close our minds to others, forgetting to apply the cultural lessons we have been taught to real-life situations. Sometimes we can’t help but giggle or be puzzled when something is foreign to us.

We can’t enforce diversity; teachers can’t tell students how to define “normal”. It doesn’t work. It comes with more real-life exposure and more maturity. The real challenge is patience and acceptance.