Several months ago, I came across a prayer that read, “help me celebrate the uniqueness and diversity with which You created us. You created us for unity, not uniformity.” What a beautiful vision and understanding of the world the way God created it—full of unique, diverse, beautiful, multi-faceted people who are meant to play into each other’s strengths and support each other’s weaknesses to create one strong, unified world.
Unfortunately, that is not the vision we’ve seen in our world, our country, our state and sometimes even our homes. What we do see is pockets of people who do long for that vision and challenge and encourage each other to get closer to it.
I see Berea as one of those places.
In its Fifth Commitment, the College commits to “…understanding and equality among Blacks and whites as a foundation for building community among all peoples of the earth.” Building true community—true belonging—is a foundational part of the Berea experience—not just for students, but staff and faculty as well.
I grew up as a biracial kid in the early 1980s, but I was blessed to be a part of a military family. My white mom and Black dad met on a base in Minnesota. By the time my brother and I came along, they had been relocated twice and were in New Mexico. But my early upbringing, in Japan and Oklahoma, was sheltered in a bubble of diversity with mixed-race families being very common and little emphasis being placed on race, color or ethnicity from friends or teachers at school. It was a diverse and accepting community—it created a sense of home in a lifestyle where your address could change every few years.
By the 1990s, that bubble would burst as I moved to South Carolina and lived outside a military base for the first time—in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the middle of the Rodney King verdict and ensuing riots. I was forced to see a much uglier side of our world—one that did not coexist well in community, but that’s what I still believed in and longed for.
Coming to Berea in 1999 allowed me to find that kind of community again. It was a rich mixture of people and backgrounds, races, religions, skin tones, ideas and perspectives. No, it was not perfect, but the overall feeling was belonging, acceptance and the desire to celebrate the uniqueness of every person.
Berea College has a long and unique history, and just like the rest of the world, we haven’t always gotten everything right. But from our founding principles of one blood, all peoples, to fighting the Day Law that changed the College’s racial landscape for half a century, to the most recent U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that many feared would change the way we select our unique student body, Berea’s mission has always guided us in the right direction. For that, I am grateful and proud of this institution, the clarity of its mission and its intentionality in maintaining the diversity that is the “foundation for building community among all peoples of the earth.”
Abbie Tanyhill Darst ’03
Editor
