This post is available courtesy of the Weave News’ series titled Surviving PWIs for POC.
It’s Monday morning. I’m in my politics class, and our profesor has broken us into groups to dive deeper into the discussion topic. Of the 5 of us in the group, 3 did not do the reading. We have a brief conversation, then an awkward silence settles. To break the awkwardness, one of the students in the group asks, “how was your weekend?”
**Saturday Morning**
I woke up feeling elated. I had a light homework load, and a friend was celebrating their birthday. I decided to go into town to hunt for a gift. With my headphones in and Sam Smith serenading my every step, I walked the 15 minutes into town and wandered through the shops. After an hour, I lost interest in sorting through the trinkets celebrating North Country culture, but mostly, my face began to hurt. The permanent smile that I was forcing to show the shop owners that I meant them no harm was becoming a nuisance. I began to head back to campus.
Now a senior, I’d learned a long time ago not to walk into town without headphones. But luck was not on my side this day, and my phone died a block away from campus. My misfortune became someone else’s opportunity. As I stood at a crosswalk waiting for a truck to pass, I watched a group of sorority girls talking with animated expressions on the other side of the street. As the truck drove by, a voice loudly yelled out “NIGGERRRRR!”
Damn my phone for dying. This was not the first time I’d been called a nigger on that street or even on campus. I walked into town knowing that there was a possibility of being degraded and hoped that the soothing sounds of whatever I was listening to would drown out the hate. Yet oddly enough, what bothered me most about the situation was not the truck driver. It was the reactions of the white women across the street. I observed with curiosity, contempt, and confusion as ten voices became quiet all at once.Ten white faces looked away to avoid eye contact with me as ten white bodies walked faster when they neared me. For a moment I wondered if they thought that my blackness was contagious. Were they afraid that some of my negative negro karma would rub off on them?
I felt sad, not because some white man with a loud opinion decided that they were going to seize the opportunity to dehumanize me, but because the behavior of the innocent white women that had nothing to do with the truck driver’s agenda felt like a confirmation of what he had yelled out. I spent the rest of the day struggling to pay attention to my assigned readings, which now seemed arbitrary. My mind replayed the events of that morning as I constructed different scenarios of how I could have reacted better. Perhaps a witty comment would have brought some humor into the moment. Mostly I found myself imagining situations where just one of the women stops to acknowledge me, or ask if I was alright.
***Saturday Night ***
The birthday party was in full swing. My friend lived in a senior student residential housing area on campus. On weekends, the seniors opened their doors to students across campus. Each house had its own vibe that was based off the personalities of the people that lived in it. Every year there is one, if you’re lucky two, houses where the majority of residents were people of color. The remainder of the houses were majority, if not exclusively white. Feeling emboldened and wanting to branch out, I went along with a friend to the neighboring house. We approached the student standing by the door, greeted him, and asked if we could go in, but we were told that there were too many people in the house and that they were not letting anyone else in.
We understood and began to walk away. At that moment a group of white students walked by. Like us, they asked if they could go in, but unlike us, they were allowed to enter. As I looked back through the window of the house I realized that all of the students were white. But it was late and I was exhausted. I did not have the energy to fight against Jim Crow at one in the morning, so we returned to our separate but equal party.
***Sunday ***
My friends and I met up for our Sunday study session. We had developed a ritual, where we spent half of the time gossiping, joking, and watching the latest Premier League game, and the other half trying to rescue our GPA’s. We shared Snapchats of white students singing along to rap music and yelling the word Nigga at the top of their lungs. A photo was taken in someone’s dorm with a confederate flag hanging in the background. A white woman was yelling TWERK! at two black women as they were walking down the street. Someone captioned their Instagram photo with something vulgar and insensitive. Our jokes were endless and helped us process the actions of our white peers. The pain underneath our masks of amusement was barely visible as we recognised many of the students’ faces from our classes, clubs, and sports teams.
***Monday morning***
To break the awkwardness of a group discussion, a student asks, “how was your weekend?”
I am the only black student in the group. I look around the classroom, and I am the only black student in the room. I pause, take a deep breath, and respond, ‘Fine. My weekend was fine.’
***Today***
In a 72-hour period I went through a wide spectrum of emotions. As a black woman at a PWI, I lived in a constant state of hypervigilance and anxiety. My days were interrupted by blatant racism and microaggressions that often left me with two choices: acknowledge the event and exhaust myself trying to interpret and understand why it was happening, or numb myself to create distance from the white people that surrounded me. By senior year I was angry, exhausted, and felt completely cheated of a college experience. Often I listened to the memories that my white peers had of our university and wondered if we went to the same school.
Every event from welcome week freshman year, to the senior week that led up to graduation was burdened with racial trauma. My peers were excited to enter the job force, travel the world, or start their internships. I was excited to leave. I was looking forward to no longer having to fight to breathe because simply existing on campus seemed like an inconvenience.
People talk about the hardest part of university being the classes, but for me it was the immobilizing racism. It was coming up with creative lies to tell my professors about why I did not do the reading, or finish the assignment, because simply saying that I was overburdened and overwhelmed by the amount of racism that I had to process over the weekend, seemed more like an excuse than a viable explanation. Yet, too often these are the experiences of students of color – experiences that get whitewashed by diversity statements and ignored by our allies. This was just one weekend. I have four years’ worth of these memories, and that is four years too many.
About Namarig:
Namarig is a Sudanese American sex positive womanist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She went to undergrad at St. Lawrence University, where she majored in History and Government and minored in African Studies. Namarig is passionate about uplifting marginalized voices and empowering communities to share their stories. Currently she lives in Minneapolis, where she works with various African immigrant communities as a reproductive health educator. A frequent advocate for black lives matter, transwomen, and immigration, you can catch Namarig in these streets fighting for your rights.