Okay, I might’ve exaggerated the title a bit, but I was saying some pretty controversial things for a three-year-old.

When I first started my education journey at the age of 3, apparently I was scared of the other children in my class because they weren’t Indian. 

Just typing that sentence makes me feel foolish because I can’t even imagine myself feeling that way. But unfortunately, that is the truth. After my first day at Montessori school, the first thing I said to my dad was, “Pappa, I don’t want to go back to school; everyone doesn’t look like us and I’m scared.” I promise I wasn’t a bigot; I was just an unaware 3-year-old.  

For some context, until that moment I was mostly surrounded by South Asian faces, because I lived in India. But when we moved to New York, my parents decided to put me in Montessori school, and that was my first interaction with American society, so seeing people with different faces that weren’t Indian caught me off guard. If I’m being honest, I don’t even remember feeling this way because I have no memory of it. That’s why whenever my parents would bring this up to joke around, I was always confused as to why I must’ve felt scared. 

After learning about the idea of phenomenology, I realized that my experience connects to this concept. Phenomenology focuses on how people’s experiences and the way they interact & interpret the world are based on their own lived perspectives. At that age, my understanding of race was very limited and mainly focused on my lived experiences, which consisted of living in India with my grandparents, walking around the neighborhood, and talking to our neighbors. My world was overwhelmingly Indian; my knowledge of the rest of the world was incredibly limited. 

This experience also relates to the concept of Race and the Visible. Race is a visible feature, but the meaning we give race is through humans and their lived experiences. At the age of three, seeing people who looked different from what I was used to, and because it was a completely new experience, it led to me being scared because everything was unfamiliar.

This makes me reflect and think that race is something that is given meaning through humans; it’s just a visible trait, just like our hair, nose, and lips. My experience in school at first, might’ve felt like a major difference to me but over time it became normal. Even though it sounds corny, at the end of the day, we are all human, and we have more similarities than differences, so the few things that are different about us should be celebrated, and everyone’s lived experiences should be valued.