A Personal Experience of Discrimination: One Student’s Story

I used to believe discrimination was something that happened to other people in history books or on the news, not to a seventeen-year-old standing in line at a coffee shop in suburban Ohio. That changed on a gray Saturday morning during my senior year of high school when the barista looked past me to take the order of the white woman behind me, then did it again when I tried to speak up. My face burned as I realized what was happening. I left without ordering, my hands shaking as I walked to my car.

That moment cracked open something I had been avoiding: the uncomfortable truth that my Indian surname and brown skin could make me invisible or unwanted in spaces I thought were mine. Since then, I have learned that discrimination is not always loud or violent, and that recognizing it in its quiet forms is the first step toward refusing to let it define me.

Growing up in a mostly white suburb of Columbus, I had always felt different but rarely felt excluded. My parents emigrated from Gujarat before I was born, and our home was full of Hindi music and the smell of my mom's dal, but outside I was just another kid who played soccer and complained about math homework. I knew my lunch looked different and that teachers stumbled over my last name during roll call, but I dismissed these things as minor awkwardances. My friends never made me feel like an outsider, and I never thought much about race until that morning at the coffee shop. Looking back, I realize I had been insulated by privilege in other ways: my family was middle class, my grades were good, and I had learned to code-switch between home and school without thinking about it.

The coffee shop incident forced me to see how easily I could be reduced to my appearance. In the days that followed, I replayed the scene obsessively, wondering if I had misread the situation or been too sensitive. But I knew what I had seen in the barista's eyes: a flicker of discomfort, a decision that I was not worth acknowledging. I told my parents about it that night at dinner, and my father nodded slowly, then shared his own stories of being passed over for promotions despite his qualifications, of colleagues assuming he was in IT because of his accent. My mother talked about the women at the grocery store who spoke loudly and slowly to her, as if she were hard of hearing rather than perfectly fluent in English. I felt a strange mix of anger and relief. I was not imagining things, but I also realized my parents had been shielding me from these experiences my whole life, hoping I would not have to carry the same weight.

When I started college at Ohio State the following fall, I noticed discrimination in subtler forms. In my introductory political science class, I offered an idea during a discussion about immigration policy, and the guy next to me interrupted to explain my own point back to me, as if I had not just said it. During a group project in my communications course, my teammates assigned me the research role without asking, assuming I would be better at grunt work than presenting. These moments were small enough to doubt, large enough to sting. I started questioning whether I was being oversensitive or whether I had a right to feel dismissed. A friend from my residence hall, who is Black, told me she experienced the same thing: a constant low-level hum of being underestimated or exoticized, of having to work twice as hard to be seen as competent. Talking with her helped me understand that these experiences were not personal failings but patterns much older and larger than either of us.

I know some people would argue that what I experienced was not real discrimination, that I am reading too much into innocent mistakes or isolated incidents. Maybe the barista was distracted or did not see me. Maybe my classmates did not mean anything by their assumptions. I have asked myself these questions a hundred times, and I know that intent does matter to some degree. But I have also learned that impact matters more. Even if no one set out to make me feel invisible, I still felt invisible. Even if my teammates did not consciously think less of me, I was still left doing background work while others took credit. Discrimination does not require hatred or malice; sometimes it is just the accumulation of a thousand small dismissals that teach you where you stand. I respect the idea that we should give people the benefit of the doubt, but I refuse to gaslight myself into ignoring what I know to be true.

Now, halfway through my sophomore year, I handle these moments differently. When someone talks over me in class, I wait for a pause and say clearly, "As I was saying." When I notice a pattern of being overlooked, I name it out loud, even if my voice shakes. I joined the South Asian Student Association, not because I need to prove my identity to anyone, but because I wanted to be in a space where I did not have to explain myself. I am angrier than I used to be, but I am also more grounded. I understand now that discrimination is not a single event I can avoid or overcome; it is a weather system I have learned to navigate. What troubles me most is not the certainty of facing it again, but the quieter question of how much energy I will spend my whole life proving I belong in rooms that should have been open to me from the start.

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