familiarity
i realized a couple weeks ago how unfamiliar people look to me here. when i was up in st cloud, on any given day, if i went to the mall, walmart, cashwise, coborn’s, wherever, the people i saw were familiar to me. given the large proportion of german descendants in the area and relative lack of diversity, this doesn’t surprise me. if there were other ethnicities, it was mostly one population; in this case, it was somalis.
now when i go out i am faced with people from a huuuge variety of backgrounds. because of mayo, this area is really diverse. and it’s kind of unnerving to go out and be amid this slough of people in an area you’re supposed to call home but not really feel any familiarity with them.
maybe it will pass with time, and i will get used to the diversity. but until then, it’s hard to call this place home. i wonder if this makes me racist/ethnicist.
2 thoughts on “familiarity”
My last semester at Winona was weird because of this. I realized after the first few weeks that everyone I recognized on campus on a regular basis was gone. Just fresh faces, young people, weird looking. I would imagine that to some degree you’re having the same dilemma. You never saw the same number of people on a daily basis as I did but I would imagine you saw some of the same people from time to time.
When I first moved to Indy I had a major culture shock because I had never been in an area that was so densely populated with black people, or African Americans (whatever’s politically correct these days). Getting out of a shell, so to speak, probably doesn’t make you feel any more at home. Taht and you spent how many years fo your life in St. Cloud?
it’s just weird because the white people look so different.