Make Your Home Among Strangers

Introduction

This week in class, we discussed the FYE assigned reading, Make Your Home Among Strangers. We also had our common read event on Wednesday, and that got fairly interesting to put it lightly. The book itself was alright in my opinion. It gave insight to the life of a Latina girl leaving her hometown for the first time while being the first in her family to go to college. 

The Book Itself

In the book, Crucet shows us that college was a major culture shock for Lizet. She found herself in an area that had a larger white population than her hometown of Miami. She was used to seeing more people like herself. She was used to seeing more of a Cuban population, but once you step out of Miami, that isn't much of the case anywhere else. In my own experience, college hasn't been much of a culture shock at all. I think most of it was pretty much what I was expecting. The only thing that threw me off the first week of class was a certain professor. He was German, and his accent as well as his train of thought were super difficult to follow. For a little while, I thought that my experience was just some rare case, and that most professors, no matter their background, were at least comprehensible when they spoke. Boy, was I wrong. As soon as I started telling my friends about this professor, they all had a least a story or two about a professor they'd had that they couldn't follow either. I have great respect for all of those professors. I mean, they're all experts in their respective fields, and they're teaching their subject in a language that for most of them isn't their first. 

Common Read Event

On Wednesday, October 9th, the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, Jennine Capo Crucet, came ti our campus to give a speech and talk to us about the topics addressed in her book. She didn't really talk about her book much past the point of mentioning that she wrote it, and we had read it. But, to be fair, she didn't have to talk about it. She was the invited guest speaker, she could talk about whatever she pleased. She did however talk about a topic that related to her book. White privilege. We all know it exists, and to say it doesn't would just be unfair. Sadly, in this world, there's a way people are still discriminated for or against based in their skin color. It's been so deeply ingrained in our society, that there are biases around us that we don't even notice. But, the way the author chose to phrase her speech on white privilege felt more like an over-generalization of white people than an open discussion. I'm not saying what she said was wrong, but over-generalizations of an entire race/skin color are what cause problems. Because, not to be that person, but they don't apply to everyone. I'd like to think that our campus is very welcoming to diversity, and I personally haven't seen any issues with it until now. Diversity and inclusion have been the center of everything we've discussed in our FYE class up until this point, and no one has ever gotten upset about any of it. I think though, that it's because we've all been very understanding of each others points of view, and we've never dared to make any accusations at one another.