The "Others" In Our Community

There are no outsiders.

I spent a long time thinking about who I’d consider to be the “others” in our tiny bubble that is Dickinson. A bubble that is as close as it gets to the “fake” life, away from the problems of the real world. While some of us try to keep in touch with the outside world (and many of us do a decent job at it too), it is hard to deny that we live in a closed and well-protected environment, with people very similar to us, or with people of similar backgrounds to a certain extent. Many stereotypes came to my mind as I thought about the “others”, and as liberal and open-minded as Dickinson might be there are indeed many polarized stereotypical groups within its student body that are acknowledged by almost everyone. After contemplating whether or not I would consider the Greek life at Dickinson to be the others, and then the sports teams, especially Lacrosse, and some other groups, I decided that I did not consider any of them to be the “others”. That did not necessarily mean that I liked all of them, but I did not consider them to be foreign or an outsider to my experience at Dickinson.

I realized that the reason for that was because I, myself, am part of the “others”, even though I often tend to forget. For the last four years, I have lived away from home, in a different country, a different climate and setting, and most importantly a different culture than mine. I never felt unwelcome, or like the stranger, or the “odd-one-out”, necessarily, but when it comes down to it I am a legal alien living on a student visa. As a Muslim student, I belong in an even smaller group within minorities, and while this has not at all affected my life in any way, I think that it has played a crucial role in the way I perceive things, and more importantly, the people around me. I have become much more tolerant, understanding, and caring towards different groups of people, not to say that I was not any of those things to begin with. I have learned to, or lets say improved in letting go of prejudices and viewing people not as Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or gay or straight, or black or white, but rather just as people, and basing my judgment on character traits or simply on whether or not that is a good person. As a result, when I view the “others” in our community, I honestly can say I find no one in particular in that category. The problem, in my opinion, is that while most people are like that here at Dickinson, transferring the same feelings of “neutrality”, so to speak, to other parts of the world, and in this particular case the Middle East and North Africa, proves to be difficult for a variety of different reasons, emotional disdain or animosity in some sense, being one of them.   And hopefully by the end of the semester we all will have taken a huge step forward in that regard.