Growing up Eurasian - half Swiss and half Indian - in Switzerland in the 1990’s was still a very white experience. I was almost without exception always the only child of color in my group, though parallel classes and sections may have had someone as well. Adding to the fact that my father’s side of the family was fully Swiss, I rarely had a reason to ‘doubt’ my Swiss-ness and for most of my childhood and schooling I tended to forget that I was in fact not white (which, looking back, I see as a positive experience, considering that the alternative could have been that my peers and even teachers could have let me felt my difference much more strongly).

The occasional remark that would come in - as a general rule the topic of chocolate in relation to skin color would surface - was almost never meant to ostracize, though I did feel it and I tended to get upset at the notion of being considered different (never mind Indian - I only began accepting and embracing my Indian heritage in my early twenties... added to the fact that my mother had grown up in Malaysia and as a child I therefore identified more as Malaysian, if anything just threw in an extra pinch of confusion for a kid who didn’t really know what to identify as but did not want to be set apart from its friends).

It’s only after coming to the US to study at college that I began to truly appreciate the meaning of diversity, in all of its pros and cons. While I definitely agree that there’s something to be said about acknowledging people’s heritage, culture and background, in some ways I occasionally wonder whether it isn’t also quite distracting and even time-consuming on an emotional level to focus on these differences so much.

I enjoyed complete and utter equal treatment with my peers, both by my classmates, my teachers and for most part even society - merit and efforts were all that counted and looking back I do have to appreciate the freedom that treatment afforded me. That being said, I was also fortunate in that I did not struggle with the language, despite German not being my native language, and that I was well-liked. Foreign children who had not taken to German as easily would naturally struggle more in the school system, which could possibly lead to a subconscious bias towards them.

I would also be lying if I said that I did not go through an angry phase later, when I rejected most of my schooling on the basis of it being totally Western-centric, and what a pompous, arrogant, etc. you get the idea...

Apologies for the musings above... I suppose what I’m trying to say is that growing up in an entirely white society, strangely enough despite being brown, the lack of diversity or the acknowledgement thereof was not as destructive as one might think, which I consider food for thought.