I live in Pforzheimer House (Pfoho), one of Harvard’s 12 houses, and this semester we’ve started a program called Pfoho Repflections. In the dining hall right after dinner, students give short speeches on any topic that’s personally meaningful to them.
Last week, I had the privilege of delivering a Pfoho repflection. A video and transcript of my speech follow; I hope they provoke some thought and discussion.
My entire life has been a prolonged identity crisis, and I’m pretty sure yours has been too.
Pick a label that people who meet you apply to you: you’re white, you’re Asian, you’re an economics major, you’re a woman, you’re queer, et cetera et cetera. Think about how people use this label to define you and how you use it to define yourself. Think about how it affects the groups you join and the friends you make. Chances are you’re still trying to figure out what this label means to you and how to deal with the problems that arise.
That’s what I mean by an identity crisis. Tonight I want to talk to you about my own identity crisis and a few things I’ve learned along the way. And as I do, I’d like you to think about your own.
So, what labels would you apply to me? I’m a guy, I’m a CS major, I ride a skateboard. Those have always been pretty uncontroversial to me.
But one label always dominates the others… you guessed it — I’m Indian!
I never really thought about it until those angsty years of high school, when I started feeling something that never seemed to bother my overwhelmingly-white peers. If they were Americans, I didn’t much feel like one: no one could spell my name right, none of the teachers looked like me, we never got days off school for my religious holidays.
It was a weird feeling, and throughout high school I dealt with it in typical high school fashion: simply avoiding it.
And were it not for college, I probably would have kept avoiding it. But college has a funny way of making you define yourself. When I walked into Harvard Yard freshman year, my white roommates and dorm-mates seemed perfectly nice and outgoing but we never said anything to each other. They never invited me to their events or mixers or group meals. Same with the computer science groups, the stand-up comedy club, آپ اس کا نام — my social calendar remained empty.
Now, there was one group that wanted me: … you guessed it, the Indians! The Hindu group personally invited me to join, and when I did, everyone wanted to talk to me and invite me to their next prayer or meal or festival. I could sit with any random Indian in the dining hall and no one would bat an eyelid; we hadn’t even opened our mouths and we already had something in common. This became my community; this became who I was. This community was a nice box to be in… but it was a box all the same.
I realized pretty quickly that this community’s acceptance had some conditions. First, you were expected to attend the Indian events and have Indian friends, otherwise people might think you were purposely avoiding your Indian identity. Second, to be Indian meant to date Indian. There were three Indian couples in the Hindu group — and that’s a lot, since we Indians don’t get to date much — and that dynamic influenced me a lot: when I asked a girl to the freshman formal, none of my non-Indian friends even crossed my mind.
If you didn’t act like this, you’d be slapped with that dreaded label. “Whitewashed:” a sellout, a turncoat, someone who had drowned their true brown selves in white culture. Because everyone else embraced these values and I wanted to remain in the community, I embraced them too; besides, in the absence of any clear sense of who I was, their moral compass was pretty appealing.
After a while, that started bothering me. But the real wake-up call came on the last day of freshman year, when I looked at my phone and realized the last fourteen people I’d texted had been Indian. There are over 6000 people at this college, of whom a few hundred, at best, are Indians. And yet I’d just texted fourteen of them… in a row.
I was missing something. In my rush to get comfortable, I had gotten too comfortable. I had found my people, but I hadn’t found anyone else.
I realized I was seeing the world in black and white — یا, more aptly, brown and white. Indian people wanted me, other people didn’t. I had everything in common with Indian people, and nothing in common with anyone else.
But that way of thinking was disastrous to my growth, and at that moment, I rejected it. I decided to force myself to branch out. Being Indian wouldn’t be enough to make someone my friend, and not being Indian wouldn’t be enough to disqualify them.
In the year since, I’m so glad that I’ve been making friends from all different backgrounds. They’ve taught me this: people aren’t part of ethnicities; ethnicities are part of people. There are tons of factors that define who you are. Ethnicity is definitely a big one — that’s why I still have so many Indian friends — but so are hobbies and interests and personalities and values. People are their ethnicities but so much more besides.
So when you meet someone new, don’t do what many Americans proudly profess, which is to be “color-blind.” Don’t ignore the color of people’s skin. Pay attention to it, because it’s fundamental to understanding their viewpoints and motivations. But look beyond it, بھی, because there’s a whole world of depth and wonder in them that no label could ever capture.
This same idea applies to whatever labels are attached to you. I challenge you to think hard about how your labels affect how you view others and yourself. Why is identity important to you, and how might you change how you think about it?
In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to figure out my own identity crisis, but don’t hold your breath. Thank you.
