Awkward

So I'm taking one of those well-meaning but bone-headed surveys about interactions with people of different religious and cultural groups. Midway through, I get this star: "I often give positive responses to my culturally different counterpart during our interaction."

Shortly thereafter, this one: "I have a feeling of enjoyment toward differences between my culturally distinct counterpart and me."

I'm supposed to rate whether or not I agree or disagree with these statements. Dear God. The questions sound like they were written by a fourth-grader doing a vocab assignment. The survey-makers couldn't come up with a more honest and authentic way to ask about relationships across cultural groups?

Also, does anyone else find these surveys to be utterly bogus? First off, I have friends whom I know are uncomfortable discussing issues of culture and race with people from "different backgrounds." I know, because they squirm on the rare occasion that I talk about it (and I do mean, rare). But I guarantee that these kids aren't going to write "I do not have a feeling of enjoyment" on that last statement.

At heart, people befriend other people with whom they feel they have something in common. If this survey wants to get at the heart of the matter, they need to ask questions like: "of my close friends, I feel a majority are the same race as me." Ask the same thing about religion and culture, see what comes up.

They'll find that people hang out with others who share their background and interests, for the most part. The question isn't whether we avoid people of other backgrounds - although many do - but how comfortable people are, within those similar networks, talking about their small but obvious differences.

I can walk down the street with a good (white) friend of mine from high school, and we can both know that we're not the same race, but neither of us is comfortable talking about it. Why is that? Aren't we friends? As time goes by, I'm a lot less uncomfortable talking about these things, but I'm constantly surprised by how rarely other people (particularly white people) are comfortable talking about it.

Just the other day I bonded with a bank teller over the fact that she was Mexican and I was Indian. We talked for at least half an hour about our families, where they lived ,what our food was like, etc. And this isn't a unique experience: all of my friends who are black, Hispanic, and Asian ask, "so, where's your family from?" and they want to know the answer. They want to talk about it, they want to hear about it. It saddens me - I can't pretend it doesn't - that none of my white friends ever ask me this. And on the rare occasions that I bring it up, many of them shut the conversation down. (Not all, but many do. And I wonder why. I honestly want to know why.) My interactions with these white friends, many of whom are very close, are limited to superficial observations like, "Well, you must love spicy food" or "so, your parents planning to marry you off?" Which, while amusing, is hardly the stuff friends are made of.

For example, I read the Gita almost every night. Its teachings have had a huge impact on how I live my life. But no one has ever asked me about my religious background. Keep in mind that I have talked with Christian friends about their church services, up to and including quoting from the Bible and attending Christian services, and not once has anyone expressed interest in being accorded that honor on my end.

But then, in general it's surprising to me how eager people are to talk about themselves ad nauseum without ever returning the favor.

What I loved more than anything about my roommates in New York was how freely we shared our differences. We had this colossal thing in common - we were young Northwestern magazine students studying in NYC - and everything else seemed trivial. That between us we were a Catholic, a Protestant, two Hindus and a Muslim (almost sounds like a joke!), or Asian, black, Indian and Pakistani - these things paled. The fact that in a single quarter I could pray in Arabic, attend Bible study, discuss conversion to Catholicism, talk about my own background - without feeling ashamed or like I was infringing on someone else's time - it was a small miracle.

Of my four best friends from home, we are a Muslim, a Catholic, a Hindu and a Jew. But the strange thing is that I didn't realize this until I went to college. I didn't realize that it was rare. At the same time, I regret that we didn't take more advantage of those differences. I wish we had talked about it with each other more than we did. As we get older, we have all moved deeper into those cultural identities. My Muslim friend is spending the year in Syria studying Arabic, my Jewish friend spent her summer studying Jewish history and practice all across Europe and working at a Jewish history museum, I myself am reading the Gita and taking Hindi and plan to work in India when I graduate.

I hope, as we get older, that these things continue to enrich us. As people who have a lot in common. And the fact that we have strong ties to our separate communities - that's a commonality as well.

Ultimately, they're my friends, and we still have a lot in common. We have a shared history.