Light Friends and Dark Friends

I've always known this, but never chose to truly acknowledge it. I knew the moment I heard about the first club I joined at Mizzou that this was going to be a different experience than I had ever been exposed to before - with a different set of people that I shouldn't view as being that different. Over the past couple years at Mizzou, I have developed two sets of friends: my Asian friends and my white friends. I don't mean to make a racist segregation connotation out of this, but this is just how my social groups ended up developing.

First, I joined a sorority that is primarily comprised of the Caucasian population. Needless to say, the Mizzou population is overwhelmingly Caucasian anyway, so my specific sorority was no different. I developed deep friendships with these girls and mutual guy friends that I still have today. I live with seven of these girls off campus now, a few of them have visited me at home in Kansas City, and I have always come to them first with any good or bad occasion that happens to me on a day to day basis. We go out together, we go to games together, we work out together and goof off together. They are my best friends here and I could not imagine college without them.

Then, I joined ACF, the Asian Christian Fellowship. This was my first Asian club that opened doors to two other minority clubs in which I have become quite active. Like the J-school mafia, I feel like Mizzou has an Asian mafia of its own. If you are an Asian-American on campus, you are probably involved in at least two of the Asian organizations and you must know pretty much everyone in each group. That's how we all got to know each other. If you join one club, you make friends with the kids there, who invite you to a meeting of another group, you make friends with the kids there, and are influenced to join them all. I love this because this is one example of how my Asian friends express their care for you. They are my family at Mizzou. They keep me accountable on my classwork, provide countless activities that promote community service and cultural awareness - but most of all they are my spiritual and emotional backbone.

It hit me this week that I rarely merge the groups, if at all. I've introduced my roommates to a few Asian friends, I've had some Asian friends over while my white friends were hanging out, but we all have not truly spent much time together. My birthday party just two days before the first day of school was the first time that both groups were in the same room together for an extended period of time - and the groups were still segregated. I don't think that my friends did this on purpose or for racist reasons, but because we all naturally drift toward the people we know best when put in a large group setting.