As I headed to my first BSU event, I imagined meeting people who knew where to find a hairdresser who isn’t afraid of natural hair, and maybe some people who knew a little bit more about who I was. But to my surprise, I felt like a complete foreigner. This is through no fault of the people I met, who did everything they could to make me feel welcome. The group was inclusive and diverse in many aspects, but I still felt as if I had stepped into another country whose customs and people I didn’t really understand.
When I mentioned my BSU experience to one of my friends here at Princeton, she said very matter-of-factly, “Well, it’s because you’re not African-American. You’re African.” She told me that people whose families had just moved from Africa, like mine, are not the same as black people who have been in the United States for generations — some of them descendants of slaves. I’d never considered this angle because I have always felt like an American and a Massachusetts girl through and through. I enjoy snowy winters, patriotic songs and sitting on the Longmeadow town green eating peaches in the summer, and home has always been an easy blend of my parents’ heritage and our lives here in America. Kenkey and sardine stew for lunch, followed by a chicken and broccoli casserole made from the recipe on the back of a Campbell’s soup can label for dinner seemed natural because that was what I knew.
At first, I worried about looking like I had chosen not to partake in a culture that I was supposed to understand by virtue of being black. Am I wrong to not count this as part of my culture? The African-American culture that has developed in the United States over generations is as foreign to me as any other: I don’t share the common history of that community, and I have come to realize that there’s nothing wrong with that.
Before coming to Princeton, I didn’t know very many African-Americans at all. According to data gathered in the last census, my town, Longmeadow, is 95.4 percent white and 0.7 percent black. I went to school in Springfield, Mass., which is a little less homogeneous at 56.1 percent white, but racial groups are sharply stratified by socioeconomic status, so attending a private school meant not having an ethnically diverse student body. It wasn’t until I came to college that I realized that I inhabit an unusual cultural limbo — something I had not been aware of before.
Finding people who understand the world we came from can be a useful anchor as we try to navigate the high Princeton seas, but it is also fine not to fit in where people think you should. I remember thinking during the “This Side of Princeton” show about how interesting it was that not everyone in the Indian, Asian or any other cultural dance group was a member of that ethnic group. People were allowed to try on whichever hat spoke to the person they really were, and it was fine if that didn’t align exactly with what they seemed to be on the outside.
In my almost-senior musings, I’ve realized that this really is a good place to be a Ghanaian, American, Catholic engineer who likes mystery novels as much as math and fashion blogs as much as NYTimes.com. We’re all free to mix up our traits however we please, and that’s what really makes for true diversity. Princeton not only has many people who belong to different groups, but groups that belong to different sorts of people.
Sophia LeMaire is a mechanical engineering major from Longmeadow, Mass. She can be reached at slemaire@princeton.edu.
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