Diversity In High School

As a woman, there is constant pressure to conform to the current standard of beauty, regardless of ethnicity. As a young woman of Filipino heritage in the middle of Missouri, the pressure to look like the other girls in class was constant. While other girls were concerned about the length of their hair and what type of glasses they wore, I felt obligated to damage my hair by dying it bleach blonde and once I found the extraordinary invention called, ‘color contacts’, I wanted to order a pair to change my brown eyes blue. However, it was something that an elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Wolff, had said; how it would be “boring” if everyone looked the same, sounded the same, enjoyed shared the same interests. That is the virtue in diversity.

Most of the schools in the Wentzville School District, in which I was slated to begin school a week or two after we moved into our home, had closed their kindergarten screening exams. So after already entering a little later in the game, I not only had a disadvantage at school but in my own neighborhood as well. My cul-de-sac was a first family dream, located in what was a then-safe neighborhood filled with households with two or three children each, all relatively the same age as I. But as I began to hold playdates with the other children in my court and invite friends from school over, I took note of how drastically different my appearance was from the other children’s. While countless other little girls had light blonde or brown hair, paired with blue or hazel eyes, I was adorned with a head of shiny black hair and brown-nearly-black eyes. Having almost always been surrounded by a group of children that bore a similar resemblance to me (there was somewhat of a thriving Filipino community in Derry), I was sheltered from ever looking different than the other children. But now as the only Filipino for miles (or so I assumed at the time), it was the first time in my short life that I had ever looked different, unique. And I did not enjoy

I began to not only accept, but also enjoy the compliments I was given on how shiny and silky my black hair was, how I glowed when I tanned or had “perfect skin”. Especially after hearing those inspirational words from Mrs. Wolff, I began to accept the simple fact that I was different and that that was okay. However, upon reaching the age of 14, I noticed a white mark appearing on my calf, no bigger than a nickel. I thought nothing of the mark, joking that my “white girl” was showing. And as additional white marks began to emerge and progress in size and paleness, I didn’t even think to worry as the majority of my skin still retained its tan color. It was only in the March of 2018 that I began to put pieces of the puzzle together. My family and I had visited the Philippines as part of our spring break vacation, meeting with various members of our family, some of whom we had not seen for four years. It was during a chat with my elderly grandmother that I noticed that she was not only pale but also had blotches of dark tan skin all over her arms and legs, some of them appearing on her face. And when I had asked my father why my grandmother, his mother, was different in color compared to the rest of the family, his answer was simple; she had vitiligo, a genetic disease that triggers the progressive