Who We Gravitate To

As I dropped my kids off at camp this morning, I asked them if they are trying to find friends at camp that don’t look like them.  My daughter, who can be a little smart a– said, “Mom, everyone looks different from me.” So, I went full into giving them a lecture on how people tend to gravitate to people that look like us.  It is very normal when we are in social situations, especially where we don’t know anyone to go and sit by someone who looks just like we do.  So, in order to meet and level up we need to engage with people who don’t look like us.  I told my kids of a time I was at a networking event and there was a table filled with white people that looked like me and a table of Black women that didn’t look like me.  I went over to the Black women and heard about this program from one of the younger Black women where she got to study engineering (which my daughter is interested in now) and travel the country.  I told Mae all about this program and how cool it sounded and told her if I hadn’t gone out of my comfort zone, I wouldn’t have ever know about this program.  I believe that we are all richer when we do this.  We all get to level up in many different ways by talking to people who don’t look like us.  But it is something that doesn’t come easy.  I have lived in the inner-city for 14 years and it is still hard to enter space that is filled with people who don’t look like me but I always gain something by doing this, I always enjoy the conversation.  So, I would like to encourage us all to do this more, myself included and all of our lives will be richer.