“As I approach my college years, I am kind of excited about the opportunity to meet and mingle with other students that may come from a very different cultural, socio economic, racial and religious background than I. I feel that I will become a better person for it.”
I think that you will be a better person for having mingled with a wide range of people from a wide range of backgrounds.
I grew up in an area that was almost entirely white. There was one black person at my highschool (he was popular, very nice and a great hockey player, leading to the obvious stereotype that all black men are very nice and great hockey players). Since I went to school in the US outside of my native country (Canada) I was invited to foreign student events and got to meet people from all over the world. I remember having a good friend from England when I was in graduate school, and admiring a student from China whose work ethic was strong. I have worked for the past 30 years in an area where I work closely with people from all around the world and have very close working relationships with people who fit pretty much any description that you can dream of. I have frequently worked with people from China, Japan, India, all across Europe, Mauritius, Africa, on occasion the Caribbean and South America, and some other places. It is great to interact and work with this wide range of people.
I think that one area which causes a lot of friction is where there is a perception that middle class people who are born in the US are disadvantaged because of race or origin. One example I can give of this is that right now in the engineering team that I work with (in the US) there are almost no US-born engineers left that are less than 40 years old (there might be one out of about 300). I honestly can’t tell you what has happened to the white US-born software engineers, but I am not seeing them. People feel that they are being replaced. Many people in the more liberal parts of the US are not noticing the extent to which people have noticed that they are being replaced, and mistake “I don’t want to be replaced” with racism.
There is a failure to communicate here. The best way to fix the failure to communicate is to talk to people, and meeting people from many backgrounds and many parts of the US and the world is a good start towards improving communication.