It’s something that is joked about on a daily basis but, not surprisingly the suburbs of Minneapolis don’t have a lot of diversity. And while to the people who have grown up without it, it may seem funny, I get the feeling people don’t truly understand what the benefits of diversity are and how it actually means something. Full disclosure, I (like virtually everyone else in the area) am a blue eyed, blonde haired, white individual and I am guilty of making jokes about the lack of diversity that plagues the area, regardless I think it’s an important issue that should be talked about more.

Experiencing many different kinds of people exposes you to so many new things and causes you to have a much more open mindset about the world and the gigantic variety of people in it. Two years ago I walked the halls of a very different school in Virginia. The percentage of non white students was 58.1%, for comparison 3% of student's are non white in my Minnesotan suburban school.

To attend these two schools is to see two very different experiences of what school can teach you both academically and just about basic human skills.

Schools is a place to learn about US History, Geometry, Physics and a whole different variety of academic topics, the quality of the teaching of these topics varies school to school. Some schools have the resources to push students a lot harder and provide their students with the learning materials they need to excel. Not every school has this luxury and, unfortunately, the trend is the more diverse schools, tend to have fewer resources at their disposal.

In my personal experience my more diverse school, had lots of problems with funding different activities and had significantly lower test scores. Where I am going with all this is that those students have something very valuable that the thousands of dollars funding the 3% diversity school don’t have.

They walk out with friends from all different kinds of backgrounds. They know that what color your skin or what your background truly doesn’t carry assumptions, they are much more likely to approach and be comfortable sitting next to every kind of person on the bus. Students in suburban Minnesota just don’t get that chance, and it’s very sad. Some of the people who have so many resources don’t even know how to talk to someone who doesn’t share their skin tone and truly believe that although it’s joked about and we all say that it’s a problem, diversity is not that big of a deal.