When Thrown Against a White Background

This my fifth year out.

At first, everyone acts like going to a PWI is a blessing. Everyone talks about how good of an opportunity it is, how you’ll be able to do things other black people aren’t allowed to do, and “network” with all these imagined rich and successful (and white) people. As a rising 9th grader I bought into the hype, excited to go to Downtown Manhattan everyday and be in a place with more resources than I ever imagine. More than I could ever use.

Going to a PWI is a blessing. My white, flagrantly rich private high school made me into who I am, gave me privileges I enjoyed and didn’t deserve. I got my “good” education, my college preparation, my leg up in the game. All of that is expected though, and no one tells you about the more destructive aspects. The isolation that becomes immediately apparent once you learn to make a white space home. My school was incredibly small, meaning that the social and economic divisions in the school were very apparent. It was easy to see who the kids of investment bankers and affluent artists were, and alternatively, who the “financial aid” kids were. The black and brown kids at my school were obviously the “diversity hires”. We were the students from more “dangerous” neighborhoods than our peers, the ones who wouldn’t be there without the endowment money.

My transition into my first PWI was disorienting, mainly because it was up to me to figure out exactly what was going on, and then quickly learn how to adjust to it. I learned that there’s a specific culture surrounding rich NYC private school kids, one that’s as toxic as it is opulent. When you fall deep enough into culture, it’s easy to put a suffocating amount of value on the multimillion dollar apartments, expensive clothes, expensive drugs, and fake social capital.

I knew from the jump that I couldn’t assimilate. I had entered the game too late and knew too much about myself and the world to buy into the materialism and elitism around me. I paid too much attention to the violence that I caused. I thought too critically of everything. I was too black, too leftist, and too vocal to exist comfortably in the space that I was in. Ironically though, in many ways it was the education and isolation that I received that made me all those things. Being thrown against the white background radicalized me politically, and my classes gave me a historical knowledge that helped to form my convictions. I’m wholeheartedly a product of the system: privileged enough to question my own privilege. That’s why part of me feels weird complaining about PWIs. It’s disingenuous for me to act as if I was somehow fooled into entering this land of milk, honey, and poison. I can’t say that I would go back and change anything. It’s almost second nature for me to explain the harm that PWIs do on a surface level. Of course it leaves black and brown kids isolated. Of course it reinforces classism. Of course we faced discrimination, disrespect, and tokenization. Such is the obvious rite of passage for us students who exist on the periphery. Less obvious though, was how deep that harm actually manifested itself in me. It’s taken me awhile to realize that a lot of the troubles I deal with were a product of my high school experience. My self-image has a lot of healing to do, and I’m learning that my double consciousness may have had a lot of influence on it. I had to understand myself as the zealous liberal, the one playing the race card, the one that was too black to be comforting but not black enough to be cool. The one who talked too much. I spent a lot of high school truly thinking that something was wrong with me, and maybe in the eyes of some of my classmates, there was. My self-assessment was influenced by the thoughts of those who just didn’t understand, and I occasionally held the rich, white, prestigious lens as my own. My experience with these lenses has me approaching Wash U like a veteran. I’ve had the privilege of previously wrestling with environments like these, and I’m hopefully wise enough to see past the smoke and mirrors. In my fifth year I know that comfort in a space not designed for you is hard to achieve. I don’t even necessarily want it anymore. I am more willing to accept that I am a disruption. I’m not doing too much by deconstructing this dark, corrupt, complicated, and occasionally beautiful space. I can better identify when these white spaces hurt me and reconcile that pain with the knowledge that I’m not deserving of it. I can acknowledge false authority and arbitrary ideas of power. I can identify toxic ideas and toxic cultures better. I can do a better job of serving myself, keeping my heart intact enough to take this education, as guarded as it is, and bring it to the world.

It’s my fifth year out, and I expect more to come. I grow with every struggle I have with this blessing, this blessing that in many ways shouldn’t be a blessing. One that exists as a product of the system that it taught me to tear down. I’ve been learning to wrestle with contradiction. My existence here inherently contradicts something.