I transferred to my middle school in seventh grade and was immediately faced with the problem of finding my place in one of the established friend circles. I thought I was lucky to find a group within a few weeks and often wondered what life would have been like had I been randomly assigned a different teacher for history class. In hindsight, however, it was not luck that landed me with my friends; rather, the inevitable pull of our backgrounds and our academic goals gave us little other choice. My previous friend groups had been mixed race, and so the stratification between the urban and suburban students and the white students and non-white students was clear to me. There were times when I wished I could make friends from different backgrounds, but stepping outside the lines and illustrating my own interpretation of friendship was never easy. However, I never thought much about why this system existed until the end of high school and the beginning of college, when the lines between friend groups on the basis of their race or neighborhood began to fade, and I never felt comfortable discussing the issue because I did not believe I could consider enough perspectives to fully understand it. The constructive discussions that I had with my peers this week were extremely liberating and enlightening, significantly different from the fearful tension I saw before. I was very impressed by the willingness of everyone to listen to the stories and opinions of others and understand that everyone came to the discussion with different levels of personal experience and therefore a different perspective. It saddened me to learn that my experience of subtle segregation in middle school was not an isolated or singular occurrence. I really appreciated the chance to discuss the topic of whiteness with a few of my peers, since now that the issue has become controversial it is even more important to recognize its continued existence and monumental impact.