The Lines We Draw

It’s weird, isn’t it?”

While working on a draft of my Expos essay, I overheard my roommate and his friend deep in conversation. We had been at college for a month, and friend groups were starting to crystallize. They were talking about how many friend groups seem to all be made up of people from the same racial or ethnic group, same social class, or same homestate.

I refocused on my draft, but the question kept popping up over the next few days. As I’d pass aisles at Annenberg on my way to make some cucumber lemonade, I would see the patterns in the set up of the tables. Like patchwork, you could delineate which groups sat where. On the sidewalk on the way to Biolabs, kids from the Asian American Dance Troupe practiced their hand formations and reviewed their dances. In Cabot Library, friends who met at Black Students Association talked about their concentrations and plans for the weekend. It was a pattern that showed up as I walked to class through the yard, passing groups of people that each existed in their own bubbles.

The pattern was not overt; I would not go as far as to claim the divisions were severe or even segregation-like in nature, but it was a pattern that was surprising in a sense.

It’s a pattern that drew me back to my home. Growing up in Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the United States, you become accustomed to divisions among people. In sixth grade, a classmate of mine told me the stark segregation in the city was a natural phenomenon that was caused by people being drawn to cultures and customs they are familiar with.

She was almost certainly wrong. Ethnic divisions present in the city can most clearly be traced back to redlining, a practice from the 1930s in which banks and institutions did not lend to African American and Russian Jewish residents, whom they viewed as threats to property values. On the north side of the city, where I call home, the effects of this exclusion are more pronounced, playing out on either side of the Milwaukee River. To the east,towards the lakefront properties on Lake Michigan, are some of the most expensive real estate in the state. On the west is the highest proportion of Black residents anywhere in the city.

***

When I came to college, I expected something new — the kind of experience you’d see in the generic college ad, where an ethnically diverse friend group of boys and girls play with a frisbee on a green lawn. I love my friends back home, but I knew that, coming into Harvard, I wanted to meet and make connections with the kinds of people you can’t find in southeastern Wisconsin. Coming to campus and seeing the patterns from back home reemerge, I’m brought back to my classmate’s comment about the naturalness of these divisions. In a school that touts “diversity,” where social divisions are not implicitly reinforced by discriminatory housing policies, could she be right?

For me, I’ve found that a lot of the closest friends I have inhabit the same shared spaces I do. Whether it be classes or my dorm, being around people for an extended period of time forces you to build connections. Perhaps it is shared experiences that drive us closer to one another.

“I knew that, coming to college, I did want to continue being around Black people, just because my area is predominantly Black. And so I wanted to make sure to surround myself with that safe space,” says Coby T. Hayes ’28. A freshman representative for the Black Students Association, Hayes calls BSA a community in which a lot of his friendships have formed. For him, he has noticed that while he’s made friends from all sorts of backgrounds, a lot of his closest friends are Black.

For Hayes, a familiar community helped buffer the newness of the college experience “We’re all experiencing something new. A lot of us are coming from hundreds of thousands of miles away,” he says. “There has to be some sense of consistency and familiarity that people are looking for.”

Others echoed this sentiment. For Bekuochukwu E. Uzo-Menkiti ’28, the first week “was kind of awful. It was very draining meeting so many new people, and forming these very, very shallow relationships.” Other students I spoke with similarly described the first weeks of September as “overwhelming,” “isolating,” and “socially tiring.”

“I found that a lot of the relationships that you built during the first couple of weeks were very, very transactional,” says Jenna Jiang ’28, the friend I overheard talking to my roommate that day in Annenberg.

But Jiang worries that groups that arise from a shared demographic cause people to force themselves into a “bubble.” As much as people are more comfortable with people who share their background or course list, Jiang believes that it creates echo chambers that prevent integration of different cultures and ideas.

So, I asked, is it the responsibility of the college to sow common threads within its diverse students?

It’s one of the reasons Harvard finally randomized housing in 1996 after centuries of self-sorting. In the 19th century, wealthier students lived in the “Gold Coast”: a collection of privately constructed housing now part of Adams House and Apley Court.

When the housing system was introduced, students still siloed themselves into distinct communities. Adams House was for artists, Kirkland for athletes, and Currier for ethnic minorities.

Now, Harvard brands itself as a bastion for diversity. Beginning in the fall of 1996, the move to randomize housing assignments aimed to ensure Houses did not harbor reputations appealing to specific identity groups or interests. Diversity initiatives have also taken shape through race-conscious admissions and financial-aid policies that increased the kinds of students who could dream of attending Harvard.

Students have mixed opinions on the College’s role in bringing together students of different backgrounds.

“Harvard should put a foot forward, and be like, ‘Hey, let’s have more involvement in intercultural relations,’” Jiang suggests. “But a bit of it is really the people who create this phenomenon.”

Amelia M. Heller ’27 also believes that the University should encourage students to integrate among themselves as well. “In an ideal world, obviously it would be from the ground up, people want to break out of their bubbles and meet other people. But in places like Harvard, we need small pushes like from the Building Bridges Fund,” she says.

Not all agree with this perspective. Vanessa Zhang ’28 is wary about the outsized role that the University could play in modifying natural friend group formation.

“It’s a little much to force people to come together,” she says. For her, it’d be weird to be friends with someone and then admit “I’m only hanging out with you because the University was like, ‘Be together.’”

For Diego Garcia-Moreno ’28, who hails from Mexico, integrative initiatives led by the University would serve little purpose. In his view, while conversations at the beginning of the school year were somewhat superficial, the vibes of campus at the time were “welcoming.”

“I definitely see some groups of friends, like the swimming team, always together. There’s also some affinity groups,” he says. “But there’s other people that are integrated, even though they have very different interests or very different concentrations.”

For Andrew A. Catellano ’28, a majority of his friend group came from the First Year Retreat Experience, a pre-orientation program geared towards first generation, low income, and underrepresented students. In contrast with his time at an all-boys private school in Delaware, where his friend group “was all white guys,” Castellano says, “now in college, most of my friends are Hispanic like me.”

Would initiatives set to bring out integration among the student body benefit students like Catellano, whose friend group on campus is significantly different from the one from his hometown? Students I spoke to, including Zhang, Uzo-Menkiti, and Heller, all found that they had independently veered away from the traditional “friend group” and formed friendships with people from all walks of life on campus. Would such initiatives serve them?

***

As I finish this article on the first floor of Cabot Library, I look up to see my friend, with whom I had spent dinner discussing how a central text of Judaism, the Talmud, became a popular book in South Korea.

He pulls out a list on his notes app that details how to say “Hello” and “Fuck you” in every language that a Harvard student he meets speaks. As he hands the list to me, I try to think of a way to say a cuss word in Wolof, the predominant language spoken in my family’s home country of Senegal. Nothing comes to mind, so I write down a mild insult that will do the trick. My friend tries to pronounce what I write down, and I correct him while laughing. Meanwhile, another one of my friends fact checks whether “Salam” is an appropriate way to say hello in Bengali.

At that moment, all I could think about is how truly “weird” it all is. I knew one of them from a class and can’t even remember how I met the other friend. There was no push to have us all together at the moment, but it worked out. It was weird, in a sense, and I liked it.