In 1989, as I graduated high school, I was waitlisted for the University of Michigan (and if I remember correctly, it was the only school I applied to). I found out rather late in the year that I had actually made it in. I then went through a blur of getting ready, taking their orientation program, and signing up for classes, which involved a lot of leafing through paper catalogs and waiting in lines -- this was the 80s, after all.
It all went by so quickly that I don't remember a lot of the experience, except for one particular part of the orientation program. This is only because it left me with a strange feeling of unease that lasts to this day, almost perfectly balanced by an inability to process exactly why I was so uneasy.
It was a seminar about tolerance, led by a college student who couldn't have been more than a year or two older than the prospective freshmen he was talking to. We discussed our previous issues with discrimination, and I found that I didn't really have anything to relate. I guess this is because I had experienced such extremes in terms of diversity in the places I had lived. I had attended an elementary school in Ohio that had *just* admitted its first black student (due to the homogeneity of the surrounding neighborhood), and by middle school I was living in a college town that people from all over the world brought their families to. I'd never really lived in the middle ground where people of different colors and backgrounds don't really know what to do with each other.
Near the end of the session, we took part in an exercise... our discussion leader had us all stand in a line along one end of the room. Then, he would ask us to step forward if we belonged to a particular minority group. "Now," he said, "step forward if you're homosexual". And with that, he stepped forward. This eventually prompted another two or three people in our group of twenty-five to move forward to join him.
"Now, step forward if you're of Asian descent," he said, and a few more people stepped forward. "Now, step forward if you're African-American." A few more people. He continued through a list of races, colors, and creeds, and the thing that struck me most about the process was that, as he worked his way through the permutations of human heritage, no group name he called out ever applied to me. By the time he was done, only I and one white girl were still standing against the wall.
The seminar leader wrapped up this informal anthropological study by declaring, "You see? The majority of us are part of some kind of minority!" Which was all well and good, but I suddenly felt rather isolated, not having been given any kind of reason to step forward.
I kept waiting for the leader to say something to the two of us who had been left behind, but he never did. He acted as if everyone had stepped forward, and to be honest I'm sure he would have been happier if we all had, driving his point even further home. Of course, later on I would realize that I should have raised my hand and asked exactly what this fact meant for those of us still standing against the wall, but those sorts of things hardly ever come to you in the moment. Instead, I just felt vaguely embarrassed, the seminar wrapped up, and we were sent on to the next stage of orientation.
Two things bothered me about that exercise, and I've been turning it over in my head for more than twenty years now. First of all was the fact that an exercise designed to show how we're all equal left me (and, I assume, that other girl) feeling excluded. Here I was, about to enter the student body of a Big Ten school. I should have been proud and confident, but I had been left feeling unremarkable and without a particular identity. The reality of this had never crossed my mind before. All the people who stepped forward had some sort of defining trait or heritage. I was suddenly lumped into some amorphous "majority" in an exercise that was trying to show that there really was no such thing. Ironically, in trying to eliminate minorities, the exercise had created a new one.
The second thing that bothered me was that I was bothered so much by that feeling. I left wondering if that were part of the point of the exercise... to make me realize how lucky I was, never having had to think of myself as belonging to a particular group or being filed under a particular label. Should I be grateful that society hasn't looked at me and assumed things about me because of something I have no control over? And if that's what I was supposed to take away, why didn't the seminar leader take the time to point that out?
Maybe it was simply a matter of his not going far enough down the list. If the seminar leader had continued, saying things like "Step forward if you're half-Latvian," or "Step forward if you like to write," or "Step forward if you're not even sure that you deserve to go to this school," I could have joined everyone else. That would have made his point that "there is no majority" better. In truth, we're all minorities of one.
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