More Similar than Different

My Experience in Diversity/Inclusion More Similar than Different

By Valerie Pichot

In the spring of 2000, I was born in Conakry, the capital city of Guinea, located on the west coast of Africa. My parents were missionaries there at the time and I spent the first five years of my life surrounded by people who looked nothing like me. By the time I was 11 years old, I had spent five years in Guinea and six in Colorado. In 2011 my family moved halfway across the United States from Colorado to Maryland, where I attended Sligo Adventist School from sixth to eighth grade. At Sligo I found myself once again, surrounded by people who looked nothing like me—a white sheep amongst a herd of black ones. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be rejected for being different. After learning that I was born in Guinea, my classmates would often tell me, “you’re not white, Valerie, you’re black.” My teachers were no different. Whenever my language arts teacher would get the chance, she would tell my entire class “Valerie’s more African than any one of us here.” At first, I was happy they were including me. It felt good to be associated with Africa, a place that held sentimental value for me. However, as time went on these types of comments began to bother me because what they were saying wasn’t true. I was not black and I was not African by blood. I was white. As I have grown older, the significance of these events has become clearer to me. For most of my classmates, I was their first white friend they had ever had; and while they accepted me as a friend, they did so without acknowledging the color of my skin. Looking back, it’s no wonder my classmates didn’t know how to properly accept me. No one had ever taught them how. They had only been taught to see the differences between white and black people, rather than the similarities. At times I am afraid that this experience has made me bitter. I am afraid it has made me feel ashamed of my own skin. But always, I am grateful for it,as I have become more empathetic because of it. In a 2009 Supreme Court nomination hearing, United States Senator Jeff Sessions said, “empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.” I strongly disagree. True empathy does not have bias. It is not prejudiced. It does not discriminate. It stands in everyone’s shoes just the same. In the end, we are more than the choices our ancestors made. We are more than the descendants of slaves or slave owners. We are human beings and we are infinitely more similar than we are different.

This picture was taken in 2004 in Bendugu, a small village in Sierra Leone near the border of Guinea. While my family was living in Guinea, we traveled to Bendugu about two times a year to work with the people there. In this photograph, my mother is homeschooling my siblings and me in the shade outside while the local children watched. 7