diaspora
The man sitting next to me on the plane ran a sports museum in Stamford, Connecticut, home of one-time Dodgers batter and Mets manager Bobby Valentine, pre-doping A-Rod, and retired post-World Series Jackie Robinson. The exhibit he curated didn't feature any of those baseball legends; rather, he chose to showcase a cadre of hometown heroes whom had never achieved Hall of Fame status, but were still memorialized in clippings of local newspapers, batting average tabulations, and traveling team rosters of Double-A minor league championship gunners. Before Technicolor, a bunch of boys would gather on a dirt field and play ball, getting together after school every single day to bat and pitch and slide "before anybody had a chance to put the hate into them." These playdates turned into high school team practices, state school skirmishes, and eventually, league championships as these same players followed each other through the hoops of amateur and professional baseball, plenty of them sticking together into the national level or trading into other Eastern League teams as free agents. Some even traveled onto some of the earliest NBA-regulation basketball courts across the country, further branching out Stamford, CT's uncelebrated impact on decades of sports history.
He himself was the descendant of the Irish potato famine and the Garibaldi revolution, his grandparents defying their rung on the very bottom rungs of the European migrant ladder in the tenements, storming out of an angry church and into the city clerk's office to reclaim what legitimacy their marriage could scrape together. He was flying to New York to meet up with the side of the family that stuck it out and stayed through it all, white flight and whatnot notwithstanding.
Diversity is hard to define and easy to take for granted. In high school, diversity became relevant mostly when it came to picking photos for the yearbook and making sure enough people got interviewed, and if not then, when it came to complaining about diversity, or rather, the lack of it. At any time or place, brushing away diversity sweeps aside the myriad intricacies of the stories that do exist under the giant umbrella term of 'diversity' and erases the incredible fact of everybody's journeys and the need to honor the places we have come from. Diversity matters more than ever in a university, and in this city and school, diversity takes on a beautifully broad definition, if any.
A class made of people who have already left fingerprints, footsteps, and lost pencils in nearly every corner of the world defies categorization. Students are already more than test scores to begin with, and here, students are most definitely more than their resume accomplishments or test smarts.
I've met somebody who trudged through every single school day up to the sixth grade with her mother in hand to help coax her way through her anxiety, working through speech drills and therapy to become a nationally-ranked debater and dancer; somebody who drove for five days before move-in day because the whole entire family was moving east, and to make sure their dog had a home with family down south while they fought to secure rent and a reasonable commute in D.C.; somebody who, under the Spanish education system, was forced to preemptively declare a major two years into high school, and is no longer sure what the rush was all about after all.
New student orientation was filled with awkward, unsatisfying, and forced interactions, yet it's incredibly refreshing being able to sit down and learn of the places people come from. People are worth believing in. People and places and places and people—what are we if we have nowhere to come from?