Switching Friends & Identity Irony

Today, I interviewed Ramandeep Chand, who was born in Detroit, Michigan, raised in Missouri and is a child of immigrants from India.

Chand grew up in a community where being a child of foreign-born parents was exceptionally rare. She had no problems with her classmates in elementary school, but things changed dramatically when the whole community ended up in the same middle school "As soon as I got to junior high, my friends from the sixth grade wouldn't talk to me anymore," she recalls.

So, Chand says she ended up making new friends, most of whom were African Americans. "Whites saw me as colored or foreign while Black kids liked me because I wasn't White," Chand tells me.

Since then, the majority of Chand's friends have been members of minority groups.

She thinks it's ironic that in America, most people look at her and don't think she's an American while in India, people there believe she's an American and not an Indian.

Can't wait to write her whole story!