"Different kid"

So I was told that this blog was to be on culture. Which is very convenient for me because attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College I suffer culture shock everyday. 

BMCC is a huge culture shock for me because I attended high school at The Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem. Because of the neighborhood there wasn't much diversity at the school at all. 90% of the students was comprised of people from the Caribbean, and African-Americans. The other 10% was Hispanic people. So I was used to being around people who looked like me. It kept me in an invisible bubble and limited my knowledge of other races and cultures because everyone in school looked just like me.

Ironically, Even though most of the people in the school looked like me in the school I stood out like a sore thumb. Because I was a skater and am an "Alternative kid" I was an outsider among my own people. What being an "Alternative kid" entails is that i listen to rock, skate, do drugs, wear black and skulls, get crazy piercings, have dyed hair, tight pants. I'm sure you get the picture. Not all of this is true but enough to make me stand out among my peers who are all into rap and sagging their pants and such that is expected of blacks by stereotypes. I was seen as being weird or sometimes as "being white".

But coming to BMCC changed that for me dramatically. Now when I walk around BMCC i see that their is every kind of person possible. This college has an extremely rich culture because it is probably the most ethnically diverse place besides the U.N. I no longer feel like an outsider because being different is the culture of BMCC. I can finally just fade into the background. And also for once I can find and have found people just like me who had the same issues. It just shows how small the world is because both of these school were both in the borough of Manhattan and yet they are on two different ends of the spectrum.