PHOTO BY NICK DANIELSON

Dear Western,

My little brother wants to leave you. It has been six months and he is tired of this campus. He’s a good student, charismatic and sociable.

Little kids love him, look up to him. He’s a leader. I think he’ll make an excellent teacher one day. He’ll have that cool teacher vibe; one of those who can crack a joke and make the room come alive in laughter. In high school, he cultivated significant relationships with his guidance counselors, advisors and teachers. They cheered him on at plays, helped him when he struggled and still welcome him back when he visits to tutor younger students.

He texted me late one night in February, asking to come over and talk. I worried, but not too much. He’s always been the one more willing to open up.

He sinks into the beanbag chair in my room and wearily but firmly announces he’s unhappy here and I hate that I recognize what he’s saying. I don’t share his unhappiness but I understand him more easily than I’d like when he explains.

“On paper, it’s so perfect,” he says. “It’s close to home, it’s not too expensive, I can see my girlfriend often, I’m in my major, you and I can share the car…” When his voice trails off with unspoken words, I know he’s struggling with the knowledge that Western is supposed to work for him.

I came to Western before him, but I was not the first. My family has been here before. Uncles, aunts and our mother too. We came as many students do; with excitement, a pocketful of scholarships, hazy visions of our future and a readiness to be challenged.

“The whole time I’ve been here, I haven’t made a single friend,” he says. “It’s not just that. There are so few people who look like me.”

He hits straight to the point, calling the shots as he sees them.

“I just don’t feel like I belong here,” he says. I feel tension like a balloon that’s been blown up too tight. For years I have tried to piece together my feelings about situations in the news revolving around racial issues across the United States. And now they have come home to me.

His story reflects that of other transfer students and those who don’t live in the dorms when they come to Western. He’s tried joining clubs and talking with his classmates, but with little success. It’s a common sentiment, this difficulty of meeting people. The way the mind numbs going from class to home, home to class, class to home. The way people feel after they find out college is unpredictable, the surprise when expectations are nowhere near reality.

“It’s hard when you’re in a group in you’re the only person who isn’t white,” he says. “I feel like people here don’t give me a chance; People look at me and they just assume things.”

I wonder if it’s worse for boys than it is for girls. I wonder if it’s just the people in his classes, if things get better as students get older. I wonder what the proportion of students who know better is to those who don’t. But I don’t wonder if he’s exaggerating.

The people he wants to get to know assume he has his own different life with his own different friends. It’s not malicious and maybe they don’t mean to. People are accustomed to lumping others into groups, dividing them into categories.

He first broke me out of my naivety toward race by winning a high school poetry competition. I knew then that an unspoken line had been crossed. We don’t talk about race in my family, other than the pride that comes with having many different skin tones and backgrounds within the same extended family.

We watched him pour out his experiences, pain and questions, into poetry that made the audience cry. He told us things I didn’t know. He told us things that scared me, like being followed around a store, about being treated badly because of how he looks. He told us his questions about life, his hopes for the future.

I felt my world tilt then, realizing that along with all the challenges life is expected to bring, my brother will have the unfair disadvantage of worrying about the assumptions and racism that swirl around us.

He’s dealt with the pain of dating a girl from a racist family. He’s been called disgusting names, names that don’t make sense in context but still hurt: the ‘N-word,’ ‘banana monkey,’ ‘spawn of Satan,’ and his least favorite, ‘beaner.’ He told me about the time he was hired at a new job and his white co-worker joked with him, saying, “There are two kinds of beaners out there, the good kind and the bad kind. Which kind are you?”

But you see we are not so easy to categorize by what we look like. The personal background of a stranger exists only in your imagination.

I am proud of both sides of my family. I love that our genealogy has been studied, painstakingly traced through books, documents and medals back through WWI, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and to the Mayflower. And before that, Norway and Iceland and a dash of Swedish and Finnish. I equally value my other lineage, where I have a genetic connection to a Central American country, which I’ve never been to, but have always been proud of. And by extension, I’m proud of the adoptive lineage I’ve grown with, the love and traditions that are both Fall River and French-Canadian.

My brother has mentioned it before, the shock of coming from the high school we did, where half the school was not white and the other half was. Where he took advanced placement classes and did not stick out like a sore thumb, but instead enjoyed the quiet secureness that comes from being surrounded by others look who like you. Where he knew others would judge him because of what he said, what he produced, what his goals were and judge him for the content of his character.

It can be called campus climate, student experiences, or race relations. I don’t care. What I know is this: if my brother thinks Western has a problem with it, then Western has a problem with it. He has always been clear-sighted in his observations and has come to Western and observed the problems that many others before him have.

He says he is viewing his time here as a checkbox, that he just needs to get his degree and move on with his life. But I feel the emotional and mental well-being of a student is too important to ignore, to ask a bright student to just try and make it. I want him to be happy here, to fall in love with Bellingham the way I did and I want him to grow as a person. I am conscious that life is not everlasting — that it matters how you spend every minute of your time.

I found myself at Western. My brother is losing himself at Western. The ambition for his classes is slowly draining because of his unhappiness with his surroundings.

He will not just be a statistic, and I do not want others to encourage him to stay to be a number used to make the school seem diverse. I don’t want him to always be asked his point-of-view on racial issues just because his peers and teachers see him as different. I want him to be able to speak out when he’s ready, if he chooses to. I want his words to fall on ears that are both willing and prepared to listen — not ones full of resentment and fear.

He tells me the only time he’s felt comfortable here is when he is playing basketball in the gym with others, because it’s about the game then, not about what you look like. I think that’s sad, that he has to resort to a basketball court to feel like others aren’t dismissing him because they think he’s too different.

I understand the knee-jerk reactions, the resistance and the inner-confusion that comes with talking about racial issues.

I know that the more people who ignore these issues because they are too complex and not relevant to their lives, well, it means the burden of change will rest solely on those who suffer when change doesn’t occur.

I understand what Western’s AS President means when she says: “Why do we have to choose between our education and our safety?” Only now do I truly understand how Western’s campus is risky for some students, the reasons why my brother wants to escape to someplace where he will not have to worry about his race.

We are young, how can we be expected to have all the right answers, solutions, strategies? I hope that those older, the administrators who have studied policy more than us, see what’s wrong with this campus and plan ways to improve it — with the urgency and determination as if they were in our shoes — because my brother deserves it.

True listening means you attempt to understand that person’s point-of-view. I know it is okay to disagree while having these conversations. People are at all different points of learning when it comes to race relations, but disagreeing shouldn’t mean dismissing, disrespecting, to stop listening or thinking.

Racism is alive and well, in all its forms. It’s in the way people do not want to hear about it, despite evidence to the contrary. And it’s in the way politicians and leaders encourage others to hate different races. It’s in the ways a person will joke about lynching. It’s when others say non-white people are taking the places of white people. It’s all the in the ways others treat those who look different worse.

I believe that focusing on what we have in common is a way to help people get past the initial assumptions and reactions. Maybe our school lacks team spirit, unity. Maybe too many people are from backgrounds where interacting with different races is so rare they never overcome the barriers to looking past appearance. Maybe we are all just too afraid to talk about race for so many reasons. Maybe we believe it’s too much work to tackle on our own, that the best option is blindness.

Eventually, with enough quality education and reflection, the uncertainty and heightened emotions settle down. I know it is not easy, painless or comfortable. In fact, it is exhausting, draining and oftentimes confusing. But it’s ultimately worth it, for everyone.

But I know Western can’t solve the core of his problem in time, that any changes will come too slowly to solve my brother’s problems. Quick fixes and quick changes may help those far in the future, but that is not soon enough for me.

Hours after he leaves my apartment, he texts me.

“Well, I’ll probably stay. The University of Washington isn’t accepting applications until August and everything is too established here. I don’t know. Don’t tell mom or dad anything, por favor.”

Signed,

A Viking