When it came time for me to look for intercultural engagement experiences, I was not entirely sure of which direction to go. Then, I looked at my unfulfilled general education credits. A friend of mine, who also happened to be in honors as well, saw a class titled Intercultural Communication and asked me to take it with him. I jumped on the opportunity. In the class we not only talked about the big intercultural topics tied to current events such as the Russian-Ukrainian war and the George Floyd movement, but we also talked about our own personal experiences. It is through the moments where we shared our own personal experiences that I learned the most.

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There was a situation where the class was talking about wearing pajamas out of the house to go grocery shopping or pick up coffee, and I expressed that personally I would never feel comfortable doing that. The majority of the people in class who were not of my race or cultural background thought that by stating that I would personally never be comfortable with that I was lessening a black female classmate’s opinion because she thought that white people could wear pajamas and everyone else would get persecuted for it. I was just trying to state that it is a comfort level thing. I do not feel comfortable going out in public in my pajamas which is why I stated that I would never wear them, yet I was deemed to have lessened her experience. To try to understand her point, I asked her why she thought the way she did, and she took it as if it were insulting to ask why you believe one way. It was then stated that I was a racist because I was lessening the person’s opinion and experience. I felt like I was put down and locked into a box. My own teacher called me racist over a small little comment, something I did not believe to be racist in any form. I had never been in that situation before, and it is not something that I want anyone to experience. The experience of being looked down upon and judged by your teacher for something that you did not take the way they did is heartbreaking, and it made me lose trust in that teacher. I felt like no matter what I’d say to her from that point on, she would only know me as the racist in her class. It was at this point in the class that I didn’t care about my grades, and I dreaded going to class. I felt as if that was all anyone was going to see and one person calling me racist branded that title on my forehead. It scares me that going forward people will see this or see that title on me and now judge me because of that one persons’ statement instead of my true character because in today’s society, we don’t look at people for who they are, we look at what people say they are. We lessen everyone else by only taking stock of how other people see them. There was one day that I had a panic attack in class because everything bad in my life seemed to collide all at once alongside more backlash for another one of my comments. I returned to class after taking a moment to myself in the bathroom. At the end of class, one of the other students spoke up and said that she also felt that it is really hard to state her opinion in class because, as a white person, your opinion often gets taken not how it is meant or even not considered when talking about topics related to cultural issues. However, this made me realize that not everything is going to be taken as you intend it to. You can choose the words that you believe are right to portray your position, but someone will almost always misunderstand it or twist it.

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Through this class I learned about the different sides to stories and how our biases can skew our visions of not only the world around us but the stories that we hear. It is through these experiences that I learned about the honor’s competency of intercultural engagement. I believe that this will help me inside college to listen better and understand the stories of the different people and cultures that surround me. An example of something I learned while in this class is that while we may think our view of the world and our experiences are normal, that does not mean that they really are. I thought that since most things in my town you often see in movies, it must mean that the experiences that I had must be close, if not exactly what other people experienced. Do not get me wrong, I knew that other people’s lives would be different, but I do not think that I truly understood how different they would be until I took this course and was all of a sudden confronted with the position of putting myself in someone else’s shoes.

As for the future, I would like to grow my intercultural engagement competency by continuing to find experiences around me to expose myself to other cultures. When I expose myself to other cultures, I find that I am more aware of my own situation and biases as well as others’ situations and biases. This experience has taught me that biases do not always have to be overt biases either. I did not actually think that I had any biases, but upon participating in this class I realized that I really do, they are just hidden. Needless to say, I am excited about where the intercultural engagement competency will lead me.