When Joshua D. Powe '98 went to his first BSAmeeting, a woman stopped him at the door.
"She said, 'I didn't know they let...ah...' Shewas struggling. 'I didn't know the meetings wereopen to people...That's very brave of you. Youhave a lot of courage," Powe remembers.
When Powe told the woman he was biracial, sheresponded enthusiastically. "She said, 'Oh, you'rebiracial, that's so cool,'" Powe recalls. "I don'tknow how cool it is. It's not like having a newsweater or something."
Powe, whose father is Black and mother iswhite, says his light skin, red hair and blue eyesmean that people usually assume he's white.
Because "it's not something that comes up,"Powe says that even many of his close friends"were shocked," when he told them he was biracial.
"One of my friends, who's blond and has blueeyes, said, `Oh, come on, how is that possible? Ifyou're Black, then I can be Black, too,'" Powesays.
Powe, who went from being stopped at the doorof a BSA meeting to serving as the organization'snew treasurer, says most people have difficultytelling what his heritage is.
"You have to be sort of astute," he says.
That astuteness is exactly what the many ofstudents interviewed see as missing from theHarvard campus--for one reason or another, manystudents are afraid to ask about others' ethnicbackgrounds and instead tend to assume.
"Usually people can't tell I'm biracial. Idon't look it. They just assume I'm white,"Johnson-Arbor says. "A lot of them are scared toask because it doesn't seem P.C. But I'm notafraid to say anything about it."
Johnson-Arbor says it took many of her peersthree years to realize that she was biracial. Whenthey saw Johnson-Arbor with her mother duringJunior Parents Weekend, they couldn't believe thatthe two were related.
"When she came to my classes, people would say,'Wow, that's your mother?" Johnson-Arbor says.
Cicely V. Wedgeworth '97 says people generallyact overly positive when she tells them she ishalfBlack and halfKorean.
"I've never gotten negative comments about it,"she says. "If anything, they go to the otherextreme."
Wedgeworth remembers in particular herexperience in a Korean class she took last year.
"People would be like, 'Why are you takingKorean?' I'd tell them I was Korean. My teacherswould be like, 'Oh, I didn't know," Wedgeworthsays.
"There was this one kid in my class. I said,'I'm Korean,' and then he went off: 'That's socool, that's so interesting,' that sort ofreaction. think it's just sort of stupid."
"It's not that big a deal," she says.