Yes, Georgetown is really white – but that doesn’t mean we have a race problem

I remember being excited about the end of what seemed to be the longest summer break ever: College baby!  Here it was.  Here I was.  I had waited for this moment my entire life. Playing football meant I had to be on campus with the team before other students arrived.  So you can imagine after running around in the hot August sun for a month, then having to sit in a tiny locker room with 300 pound men who did not quite understand the importance of deodorant, I was ready for the school year to start.  

The morning of move in day I woke up to the unfamiliar sound of other people outside, and rushed out. But as I saw the people I would be sharing living quarters with over the next year, I quickly realized the reality that, not only was I the only black guy on my floor, I was one of the few on campus.

But more so than anything, I was confused.  This couldn’t be right.

I went back to my room, first to find a shirt, and then to question how this could be possible.  It literally made no sense.  I had been on campus training all summer and everywhere I turned there were black people.  The basketball team, all of them were black.  The track team, I’m pretty sure one of them even had dreads.  The football team, we had at least twenty black guys.  I literally could not wrap my head around it.

Where were all the black people?  We had constituted a majority over the summer.

I kept repeating this question to myself that entire first year.  And it didn’t help that I kept finding myself being the only black guy in the room.  In my classes, at the gym, while eating in the cafeteria…I felt like I was in an alternate reality. The one positive was that I always found myself getting picked up first when we played basketball (all stereotypes aren’t bad).

But not being able to identify with many of my classmates meant I became very introverted.  I didn’t feel like my community had much to offer me, and sadly I convinced myself that I didn’t have much to offer to it either. I figured all these rich, white kids with their popped collars on their Vineyard Vines polos and salmon colored Chubbies would never accept someone like me.

I grew up about 20 minutes outside of DC, having lived and went to school in predominately black communities.  My community was so black that I thought it was a myth that white people are a majority of the country.  I know its funny and you may be laughing at this point, but I am so serious.  My world was small. So my freshman year of college I started feeling more and more out of place as the year went on.  “No one likes me.”  “They don’t accept me for who I am.”  “The girls here don’t want me.”

It seemed like the more everyone else was getting to know each other I was retreating into a shell.  And the thing was I wasn’t alone.  I would constantly find myself in crowded rooms on Friday nights with the same few black people, all feeling this same sense of displacement in a place we were supposed to feel at home.  We all felt like we were unwanted.

I kept feeling this dissatisfaction until one day something happened that changed the course of my college career and possibly my life forever. My next-door neighbor made it a point to blast his music every afternoon, which I wouldn’t have minded if I knew at least one of the songs he played.  But there was this one song that he played almost every day.  “OH OH SOMETIMES, I GET A GOOD FEELING!”  The hook is what sold me.  So I went against every part of my body that told me not to do it and I went and knocked on his door.  

The door opens and as the smell of weed poured out into the hallway out comes this kid that looked like he was straight out your typical frat movie. “What up Ay,” he said.  Okay actually he didn’t say that, but he was Canadian and that was my best attempt at something a Canadian would say when they answer doors.  

No, I actually asked him what the song was he kept playing.  He got all excited.  “YOU DON’T KNOW AVICCI BRO! (I’m paraphrasing bro talk).”  I went on to listen to that song, and this is not an exaggeration, 69 times.  But at the same time in simply knocking on the door of my next door neighbor I made a life long friend.  After that day he invited me to parties I had never though to go to.  I learned that there was a black person in the NHL.  I even learned how to play beer pong.

I no longer felt out of place.  I was home.

The thing is though it took me getting older to realize that I was never really out of place.  I had simply convinced myself that everyone was looking down on me for being different rather than embracing them.

Don’t get me wrong, there were definitely times where I found myself standing outside of my dorm being harassed by campus police for apparently not being a student or people walking a little quicker at night when I came down the street.  The thing is though in those situations I took myself out of it.  There are always going to be biases in people.  I can’t control those.  All I could control was how I viewed myself.  And in changing my way of thinking from thinking it was a burden being one of the few black people on campus to thinking it was a blessing being one of the few black people on campus completely changed my outcome.  

Recently someone asked me if our university has a race problem.  And my answer to that would be hell yes.  There is no reason why in 2016, only three per cent of your student body is black and 60 per cent of that three per cent are student athletes.  But at the same time for those of us that are the few that are here we are included.  Is it always easy to be the one to have to go and initiate conversation? No.  But in the fight to end racial injustice in this country how else do we end prejudice unless we are willing to knock on the door and see what is on the other side?