Office of Multicultural Affairs event encourages students to talk about identity

The Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) hosted its first Identity & Cuisine Night of the school year on Tuesday. The event was a part of OMA’s Heritage 365 initiative, which is a unified approach to celebrate African American, Latinx, Asian Pacific and indigenous cultures throughout the year, and was sponsored by the University’s Asian and Pacific Islander Association. 

The event featured three presenters from the Hopkins community: Nairuti Shastry, the community partnership specialist at the Center for Social Concern; sophomore Sanjana Boyapalli, director of internal communication of the Multicultural Leadership Council and junior Alisha Chen, a member of the Inter-Asian Council (IAC). 

Each of the presenters shared a slideshow of pictures while discussing their various identities and how they intersect. The identity categories they explored revolved around race, gender, sexuality, hometown and major. Participants then had the opportunity to ask questions, leading to a conversation surrounding their thoughts and reactions to the presentation. 

Shastry, who presented first, explained that she organized her slides in chronological order. In her presentation, she discussed her identity as a brown person in the U.S. and how her studies of sociology in college helped her come into her own identity. She further talked about her desire to combat anti-blackness and her work to figuring out how best to do so. Boyapalli and Chen highlighted their experiences finding a sense of community and belonging at Hopkins. 

“Hopkins allowed me to explore every aspect of my identity and all of my passions that I have decided on, whether it be mental health research or just with my friends,” Boyapalli said. “I had a lot of white friends, I didn’t really have any Indian friends and now half of my friend group is Indian, so my Indian identity is no longer really taking a backseat anymore. It’s really become an integral part of who I am. And my friend group is now more diverse than it’s ever been.”

Chen related her experiences with impostor syndrome since she has come to Hopkins and her struggle to move past it, given that many people from her small town do not pursue higher education. 

“I felt so lost,” Chen said. “When I was in classes, I didn’t feel as prepared as I wanted to be when I was entering these places. I academically always felt like an imposter. I didn’t feel comfortable raising my hand if I wanted to ask a question.”

However, she explained that her involvement in IAC has helped her overcome these feelings of inadequacy and doubt. It has also helped her overcome fears that she was not “as Asian” as many of her peers. 

“One way I have been trying to overcome my imposter syndrome is through my participation in IAC,” Chen said. “It’s the organization where I started to put words to all the feelings I was having, like the model minority myth and affirmative action and the intersections of our identities. I started coming to terms with the fact that my experience in the Asian diaspora is valid.”

Formative experiences in grade school both figured into Boyapalli and Chen’s presentations. Boyapalli included symbols for Hinduism in her presentation, the ohm and the swastik. She discussed how in Hinduism, the swastik, or the swastika, has a very different meaning from how it is understood in America, where it’s a symbol of Nazism, the Holocaust and antisemitism. She came to learn about this discrepancy in fifth grade. 

“I was completely taken aback because I had never seen it outside of temples or my house when we were doing prayers and everything so it took me a really long time to understand that something I saw as so normal and so good had a completely different connotation,” Boyapalli said. “I never meant to hurt anybody. It was the first time I had to think about my identity in terms of the way it impacted other people.” 

Chen said she felt like an outsider in the predominantly white town she grew up in. 

“I remember seeing people make fun of my eyes, looking at me a certain way, my height and stature, being a lot taller, the sense of ‘otherness’ just in the foods I was eating and bringing to school and the ways in which I was moving about in those public spaces,” Chen said. She told a particular story from her childhood where another girl in her middle school pointed at her lunch box and asked her if she was eating dogs. Chen mentioned how these conversations forced her to act as a representative for the entire Asian race. 

“I said no, it’s not dog meat. So then she said, ‘do Chinese people eat dogs though?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so,’” Chen said. “It was me trying to grapple with this individual, trying to be this entire representative for someone as a person of color in the APIA community.”

Boyapalli and Chen both stressed the different roles that their home and family community played in shaping their identities. Boyapalli described the role that the strong sense of community in Indian culture has helped to impose impose important standards that she strives to live up to, especially in terms of giving back to the community and participating in service initiatives. She said that she began to volunteer at hospitals and at elderly homes as soon as she was old enough. 

“From a really young age, I was taught how important community is and how it’s really important to give back to your community. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been involved in volunteer work of some sort,” Boyapalli said. “I remember when I was seven or eight years old and going with my mom to blood drives, where she was donating blood, or going to Goodwill to drop off things I didn’t want.”

Chen noted that her parents’ immigration to America so that her father could pursue a PhD instilled a strong value of education. She also explored the makeshift family community she was able to find in her hometown of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, even though she did not have extended family in the area. She explained how all the other Chinese families in the surrounding neighborhoods would gather during holidays. 

“I had a sense of community when I would go during those holidays to talk with those other kids, that I hadn’t really found at my public school,” Chen said. 

Junior Nikki Li, who attended the event, appreciated the way the event helped her reflect on her identity and establish a sense of community through shared experiences. She pointed out Shastry’s exploration of familial expectations as something that resonated with her in particular.

“I related to the difficult relationship between family being constructive and obstructive in forming one’s identity around cultural norms,” Li said. 

The Identity Series & Cuisine Night is a monthly and invites various Hopkins affiliates to speak about their identities with students over dinner. The next event is on Tuesday, Oct. 8, and it is sponsored by Black Heritage 365.