The Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University

You wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is to check your phone. You have no Chinese friends, you know nobody from the Congo, but that’s where the minerals came from. Your phone was made in China, but the company is based in California. You drink water that you didn’t collect nor process yourself. You switch the lights on, but you didn’t do well in science, circuits baffled you. You look in the mirror as you brush your teeth, you know nothing technical of glass making, plumbing, toothpaste or brushes. You take a shower using black soap, you don’t know how it got to you or where it came from. Your towel was made somewhere, you dry your skin, reaching for the coconut oil: it says made in Brazil, but you have never been there.   Time keeps flying by as usual, you’re hungry now, throwing your clothes on. Labels are not a big deal to you, but they were made somewhere far from where you reside. Running down the stairs, you grab the handrail, wood from an area in America wher...

I was born and raised in a different country, one where diversity was the norm rather than the exception. I grew up meeting people from different places, with different accents, cultural backgrounds, and colors. I was taught that everyone is a person with a different story to tell. It isn’t customary for me to be surrounded by people who are exactly like me, but I find that this isn’t many people’s reality. In the past few months, I have found myself surprised by my friends’ comments on diversity. I hadn’t realized that my interactions with them were probably the extent of their interaction with diversity altogether. Some people pointed out that I was extremely diverse to them.   I wouldn’t say I am not diverse, but I hadn’t thought about it like that, because as I have mentioned, I tend to forget that diversity isn’t everyone’s norm. These experiences opened my eyes to the truth of diversity at Hofstra. The dejecting reality is that the university is still in the primary s...