Have you ever experienced discomfort because you were a minority?  I recently read “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote powerfully and poetically about his experience as a black man. The incidents he recounted reminded me of a couple of my personal experiences. 

The first incident happened in my first year of business school more than a decade ago.  It was a break between classes, and a white student was studying alone in a large table.  I thought he was one of the friendliest guys in our cohort.  I walked over, greeted him, then sat across from him, planning to study together.  To my surprise, almost as soon as I sat down, he stood up and started packing his books.  I asked him why he was leaving, and he gave me a polite answer.  I don’t remember what he said, but I felt rejected.

I also remember feeling unexpectedly overwhelmed in a “fish bowl” activity during a class on multiculturalism during my doctoral training.  As part of the simulation, I and other ethnic minority students sat in the center of the classroom, encircled by the white students.   It was a dramatization of a familiar experience when I was a recent immigrant – not being able to fit in with the mainstream.  I felt palpably excluded.

These incidents happened many years ago, and I have become confident in myself and connecting with people from different background and cultures.  I have also developed a deeper understanding of how I have been shaped by experiences of discrimination and privilege.  I want to help others who struggled as I did.

A person can be a minority because of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, disability, etc.  If you identified as a minority, have you had similar experiences as those I described above?  How did they affect you?