'Learn Their Names'

When Sharmila Sen '92 took a Hindi class last year, she became friends with some other South Asian students.

The new friends, she now recalls, also brought some new realizations.

Sen noticed that when she walked into a dining hall with a group of other South Asians, people looked. "You're more of a spectacle if you're people of the same race or ethnicity," Sen says.

Sen also noticed that her white friends referred to her South Asian friends merely as "South Asian friends."

"Learn their names," Sen told her white friends.

Sen, an English concentrator from Quincy House, grew up in India but has lived in Cambridge for the past eight years.

She went to high school at the Pilot School, "kind of a hippy high school" that is part of Cambridge Rindge and Latin.

"Diversity was the cornerstone thing in our high school," Sen says. "People just mixed very well."

Her first-year roommate was a Black woman from Washington, D.C. Sen says she and her roommate "almost never" talked about being Black or South Asian.

"It would have been artificial for us," she says, because "there are so many groups you belong to, and race isn't the only one to discuss."

Sen says she also feels strongly about her identity as a woman.

"You're working from two things. As an Asian and as a gender minority. Indian women are taught so much to compromise," Sen says.

She adds that the phenomenon of people staring when a group of South Asians walk into a dining hall together is even worse when a group of South Asian women walk into a dining hall.

Sen doesn't think the Harvard situation is perfect, but says that divisions are usually not malicious. "I think if we are divided, a lot of it is because of us, who we are and what particular cultural baggage we bring with us," Sen says.

And those divisions, she says, can be overcome. "Some things are universal," she says. "People can understand."

For instance, "hard parents are hard parents. It's not just Asians' prerogative to have them."

And if the obstacles are overcome, Sen says, the gains can be enormous. "There's so much you can get from other people," she says.