Observations

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to offend any particular group. I am as guilty as anyone I write about.

My subgroup of 17 students is rather unique among the other subgroups in my year. We have a sizeable proportion of non-Caucasian students, and rather surprising in a Scottish university, actually slightly outnumber them. Most of the time, however, we don't really think along racial lines, and students of all races and cultures mingle well together.

Or do we?

We were all having lunch together today, and of course, there wasn't space for all 17 of us on the same table. So as each person bought their food, they walked towards the table where most of their friends were seated, so that the group was split pretty evenly into two tables.

It wasn't til everyone was seated that someone noticed and remarked, "What's this? Some invisible ethnic division line?"

I hadn't even been thinking about it before, but what he said was quite true. The other table was full of whites, and my table was full of non-whites.

We all laughed about it, and promptly started planning activities which would involve the whole group, but I couldn't shake the feeling that everyone felt rather embarrassed about the unconscious "clique-ing by race" that had just happened.

None of us is racist. I on my part would love to make more Caucasian friends, and I know many Caucasians have gone out of their way to integrate us into their groups as well. And yet, and yet, and yet, the feeling I'm always getting is that I am awkward and they are patronising.

I thought at first it might be the culture difference. Maybe they just don't know enough about non-white cultures and are afraid to offend, so to avoid the tricky business of always being politically correct, they subconsciously avoid. I know I sometimes did that back in Malaysia with some of my Malay classmates as well.

But that argument doesn't make sense. The thing about the non-whites in my group is that most of them are actually second-generation British citizens. This basically means they grew up in the UK, went to school with white people, played and had fun with them, speak their language, adopted their mindsets even. So why do they still, when they aren't thinking too hard about racism and other such complicated things, hang around other non-whites? X in my group, a UK citizen from London, probably has much more in common with my Caucasian groupmates than any Malaysian or Brunei-an. Odd that his "group" should still be made up of non-Caucasians.

After pondering a bit on this funny phenomenon, I decided that when all is said and done, maybe we human beings are more clique-ish than we thought. Maybe even more racist than we thought. And I thought maybe I, and lots of people I know, will have to work much much harder than we are now to bridge the invisible ethnic divide that is so seldom acknowledged and addressed.