Name: Maria
Major: Sociology
Being a mixed woman of color, a black woman, adjusting at a historically women’s college was exhausting regardless of the other marginalized identities, passions, or ideas my peers and I shared. From growing up in the urban heart of Philly to relocating to already-familiar suburbs, my first year was an amalgamation of experiences that forced me to rethink how I saw myself, from being one of three black people on my hall to reimagining my worth when my concerns were unheard or my tone was misinterpreted. The difference my blackness embodied became earth-shattering. In the spaces I inhabited or the ones I hesitated to enter I felt the breach (in experience, in reality, in understanding) widen, and with it the need to defend, celebrate, and know myself and my identities intensified compared to the responsibility I felt at the local Philadelphia public school that I attended. There, I was black but visible. Here, the campus culture and language of activism left me feeling more on the margins than I ever had before. Experiences of hidden microaggressions left me feeling discouraged, powerless, and silenced, my place in academia feeling meaningless among hardships that became more visible to me, and my comfort in my blackness feeling more unsteady than I can remember it being.
The ease I had felt in making friends and leaving home made my first year experience worthwhile. In my near-constant struggle with white peers and injustices, whether interpersonal or institutional, that those around me failed to take note of, my excitement to explore and learn more about the arts and social sciences I had fallen in love with, to work jobs that I enjoyed, to recreate my identity, and to prioritize myself in ways I may not have been able to at home carried me through the troubling moments. I am learning to heal from present wounds and bloom colorfully among circumstances created to make me wilt. I am learning to re-imagine my purpose here despite the hardships. I am learning how to master white academia without sacrificing the identities that I hold. But on a more personal level regardless of academia I am learning to take the comfort in myself that I’ve been forced to embody at college home with me, while also learning to make peace with the pieces of myself that still hold discomfort and uncertainty in growing pains, sacrificing none of them.
My experience of college has been nothing that I expected and everything that I didn’t. I ended up at a school I never expected to love regardless of being familiar with it, and ended up not loving in it the ways I thought I would. I found love (of disciplines, of work, of other things beyond my imagination) in unlikely places. I’ve been fortunate enough to have the chance to create community among the people of color at my college, an element of my experience that I love dearly. I’ve created relationships with professors and administrators who emphasize the value in my work when I’ve forgotten it and who care wholeheartedly about my voice and my health. I’ve made friends without whom I couldn’t imagine surviving otherwise. The encouragement and power and love needed to carve our own spaces is only strengthened by the largely white woodwork within which we exist, and together we’ve fashioned intimacy out of the mutual experience of racism at a PWI.
