One of the most profound moments of my college career happened during my sophomore year at the University of Tampa.
At the time, I didn’t know it was profound.
I didn’t know it was going to reshape how I understood culture, identity, friendship, and the larger world beyond the United States.
All I knew was that I was starting over.
When I returned to college for my sophomore year in the fall of 1988, I was in a very different place than I had been as a freshman. I had just been hired as a resident assistant, so I was stepping into a new leadership role. But socially, I was also standing at a crossroads.
Toward the end of my freshman year, I had started building a meaningful friendship with someone who had become my roommate and eventually my best friend. I also had a friend from my hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who had attended the University of Tampa with me that first year.
But when sophomore year began, neither one of them returned.
So I came back to campus alone.
Not physically alone, because there were people everywhere. But emotionally, socially, and personally, I felt like I was starting from scratch. I had met people during my freshman year, but I had not built the kind of circle that made me feel grounded. I was still trying to figure out where I fit.
And then one day, something simple happened.
I was walking past one of the dorms when I saw a student standing outside on the balcony. He looked visibly upset.
I stopped and asked him if he was okay.
He told me everything was fine.
But I said something like, “I just wanted to make sure, because you looked upset. I thought maybe you might want to talk to somebody.”
I didn’t think much of it.
But he did.
He told me he had been standing there for a while and that it was obvious something was wrong. Yet nobody had stopped to ask him anything. Nobody checked on him. Nobody said, “Are you okay?”
I was the first person who did.
That brief moment opened the door to a friendship that would shape my college experience in ways I could not have predicted.
He was from Aruba.
I was from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
And that mattered—not because his being from Aruba created distance, but because it opened a door. Up until that point, I had never really known an international student. I had grown up in a place where exposure to different cultures was limited. There may have been people around me with different backgrounds, but I had not been close enough to them to understand their world.
This was different.
Through that friendship, I was introduced to a group of students I had seen around campus but had never really interacted with. Many of them were from the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and other parts of the African diaspora.
At that time, the University of Tampa was not a large school. There may have been around 1,500 or 1,600 students, and the number of Black students was small. But what I came to realize was that among the Black students on campus, many were not African American. They were from places like Aruba, Jamaica, the Bahamas, St. Croix, and other Caribbean nations.
That was new for me.
I had grown up understanding Blackness almost entirely through the lens of the American South.
Pine Bluff.
Arkansas.
Segregation’s shadow.
Jim Crow’s afterlife.
Black church.
Black school systems.
Black neighborhoods.
Black survival inside the American racial system.
But here I was, being introduced to people who looked like me in some ways, but whose cultural identities were not shaped by the same American framework.
That was my first real lesson.
The African diaspora is not one thing.
It is connected, but it is not identical.
One of the moments I remember most clearly happened when I was first brought into that international student circle. A young woman looked at me and told me plainly that if I was going to spend time with them, then it was my responsibility to learn their culture.
Not the other way around.
She made it clear that even though they were going to school in the United States, when I entered their space, I needed to respect and understand where they came from.
I think she may have expected resistance.
Maybe she thought I would say, “Well, we’re in America.”
Maybe she thought I would be offended.
Maybe she thought I would decide it was too much work.
But I simply said, “Okay.”
And I meant it.
Because what she did not understand was that I was curious. I had come from a place where I had not had many opportunities to engage the world that way. I was not threatened by the idea of learning someone else’s culture. I was fascinated by it.
And once I started paying attention, I began learning lessons I have carried with me ever since.
I learned that country pride often mattered more than racial identity.
That was different from what I knew as a Black American. In the United States, race is often the first category people place on you. Before they know your hometown, your family, your values, your personality, or your story, they see race.
But among many of my Caribbean friends, identity moved differently.
Being Jamaican mattered.
Being Bahamian mattered.
Being Aruban mattered.
Being Crucian mattered.
The island, the flag, the dialect, the food, the music, the history—all of that carried deep meaning.
I also learned that it was lazy to lump everyone together as “Caribbean.”
Each country had its own rhythm.
Its own language patterns.
Its own food.
Its own customs.
Its own version of Carnival.
Its own way of understanding class, color, nationality, and belonging.
Even when there were similarities, the differences mattered.
And that lesson was bigger than college.
Because the world often tries to flatten people into categories.
Black.
Immigrant.
International.
Caribbean.
African.
American.
Minority.
But real life is more complicated than that.
People carry histories inside them. They carry nations, languages, migrations, family expectations, colonial legacies, regional pride, and cultural memory. When you reduce people to one label, you miss the richness of who they are.
That was one of the greatest gifts of my time at the University of Tampa.
It gave me a glimpse into a larger world.
For my friends, moving across countries for education was not unusual. Some had gone to school in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, or the United States. They were used to navigating cultural systems. They understood how to move between worlds.
I, on the other hand, was excited just to go from Arkansas to Florida.
And that contrast taught me something.
Not everyone experiences the world from the same starting point.
Some people grow up being taught to think globally because their lives require it. Others grow up in communities where the world feels distant, abstract, or unreachable.
For me, those friendships made the world feel closer.
They helped me understand that Black identity was not limited to the American story. It was part of something broader, older, and more global.
There were people of African descent all over the world carrying different stories, different struggles, different joys, and different ways of seeing themselves.
And while we may share certain experiences because of race, we do not all experience race the same way.
That is an important distinction.
The Black American experience is real.
The Caribbean experience is real.
The African immigrant experience is real.
The Afro-Latin experience is real.
The experience of being Black in Europe, Canada, South America, or anywhere else is real.
They may overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
That realization humbled me.
It made me listen more.
It made me ask better questions.
It made me less likely to assume that my experience was the center of everyone else’s reality.
And honestly, that lesson still matters today.
We live in a time where technology makes the world feel smaller. We can connect with people across continents instantly. We can watch videos from other countries, listen to music from other cultures, build friendships across borders, and see global conversations unfold in real time.
But access is not the same as understanding.
You can see the world and still not respect it.
You can consume another culture and still not learn from it.
You can enjoy the food, music, language, fashion, and beauty of a people without ever taking the time to understand their history, their dignity, or their perspective.
That young woman at the University of Tampa gave me a principle I still believe in:
When you enter someone else’s cultural space, enter with humility.
Do not assume they are responsible for making you comfortable.
Do not assume your way of seeing the world is the default.
Do not assume proximity equals understanding.
Learn.
Listen.
Pay attention.
Respect the differences.
That lesson started with a simple friendship.
A young man from Aruba standing on a balcony, visibly upset.
A young man from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, deciding to stop and ask, “Are you okay?”
That moment could have passed without meaning.
But it didn’t.
It became a doorway.
A doorway into friendship.
A doorway into culture.
A doorway into the African diaspora.
A doorway into a bigger understanding of the world.
By the time I left the University of Tampa, many of the people I spent the most time with were from the international African diaspora. I was often one of the few African Americans in those spaces. And I was better because of it.
Those relationships stretched me.
They challenged me.
They taught me that identity is layered.
They taught me that culture is not something you master from a distance.
They taught me that the world is much bigger than the place that raised you—but the place that raised you is still part of what you bring into the world.
I came to Tampa from Pine Bluff thinking I was simply going to college.
But in many ways, I was also being introduced to the world.
And the lesson has stayed with me all these years later:
Sometimes one act of kindness can open the door to an education no classroom could ever fully provide.
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