Attending a PWI while dreaming of an HBCU

Name: Nia

Major: Education and Public Policy, African American Studies

Going to a school with a majority white population was especially hard for me to accept freshman year because I wanted to go to a historically black college (HBCU). Having visited HBCU's in the past, I am quite aware that the experience is so different than that of my school. Since I grew up in Philadelphia and went to a diverse public school, I wasn’t in shock about being around white people. I was however not prepared for the type of white people I encountered. These were people who had grown up in affluent all white towns and who have very limited contact with people of color. What set them apart from the people I grew up around is that they never had their whiteness challenged, which allowed for a strong sense of superiority, oblivion, and overall ignorance.

While I do not have an individual experience to talk about, I will talk about the overall experience of life as a woman of color on the campus of a predominantly white institution (PWI). I think the best way to describe my experience is what W.E.B. Dubois identifies as double consciousness. Not only do I have to be conscious of how I am acting and what I am doing, but in addition, I am conscious of how my actions are perceived by the white people on this campus.

I take a lot of social science classes in which we discuss race, class, gender, etc. differences and in classrooms where I am one of few or the only one, I can’t help but feel as though everyone is looking at me, and when I do participate, I have to convince myself that it's ok to be the only black girl in the classroom and speak on these issues when I have unique insight, or something to add that I learned from my previous classes. Regarding the sense of double consciousness, I also feel a sense of mistrust. I have found that you never know someone’s true intentions, and given the racial tension in America right now, that can be a dangerous situation. I cannot count the amount of times I have been in a classroom full of white women (the predominant population of my classes) and heard them talk about how unfair the schools system is to minority students and how it’s such a shame the way the system is set up. On the offset this is a great thing that they are concerned for underserved students however every conversation drips of pity, superiority, and white savior complex. The trickiest thing about having these conversations is that it is hard to confront someone about wanting to do the right thing and giving constructive criticism on that when they are completely unaware of the nuanced issue. If I had to highlight one thing that is the most stifling to my voice as a woman of color in the College of Education at a PWI, that would be it. Knowing how to address white people based off my personal feelings of disingenuity hardly seems like enough to risk the attention that comes when a black person speaks their truth in a room full of white people who take these conversations as personal attacks rather than suggestions for improvement. However, these conversations are necessary to open the conversation of the conflation of sympathy and pity of minorities from white people.