When I started getting into colleges just before my eighteenth birthday, each big acceptance package was accompanied by a separate, smaller envelope inviting me to the special weekends designed for students of color. The names were always different—Minority Student Weekend, People of Color Acceptance-Fest, Juneteenth, Super Predator-palooza…I’m kidding about some of them. I think. But one college legit called theirs Third World Weekend. It was the late nineties. Things were wild.
The objective was always the same: to give you a taste of what it was like to be a person of color at Cornell or Brown or Yale or wherever. This was odd to me. Like, how black was this experience going to be? Would there be a mac and cheese bake-off? Was it just going to be forty-eight hours of church? The only thing I knew for sure was that we would definitely be singing the Stevie Wonder version of “Happy Birthday,” aka “the only version of ‘Happy Birthday,’ actually.”
(Have you ever been to the birthday party of someone who has a really mixed group of friends and the white people start singing the “regular” version of “Happy Birthday,” which, honestly, rivals “Streets of Philadelphia” for atonal glumness, and the black people launch into Stevie’s version and then everyone gets really confused because the white people have no idea what just happened? That’s my FAVORITE thing, because I like to imagine that for a brief second the white people think that they’ve slid into an alternate reality and they have to question everything they know to be true and, honestly, that’s reparations. A split second of reparations.)
I’m just saying, there are a lot of black identities and experiences. And I needed a lot more information, as a nebbishy, sheltered high school senior, about what kind of black experience I was signing up for during the Kunta Kinte Kollege Kampout. Would there be a place to self-disclose my particular racial experience on the RSVP card? At the time, I considered my racial identity to be “Vanessa Huxtable.” So that’s a “yes” for jazz, black history, and small moments of dancing, but a “no” on Tyler Perry films and grills (mouth or backyard). I am not against them; I just don’t know how to do them.
And besides, I wasn’t aware that my race was going to come into play during this process. Getting into college went from being a hazy, amorphous next step to the goal that I put all of my feelings of self-worth and my parents’ hope into. It was a source of pride but I didn’t realize that it was also a source of Black Pride. That was a horse of a different colored.
I thought my success was dependent on my brain and not my skin. After all, that’s the thing that my parents applauded me for. It would be weird for one’s parents to congratulate them on being especially black today. But maybe that’s how other families operated. I wasn’t sure but I began to wonder.
If it was a competition (and I wasn’t sure it was a competition but it probably was a competition), I knew I wasn’t the blackest member of my family. I mean, my mother had been involved with the Panthers and my father had taken over the student center at MIT in a civil rights protest during undergrad. Meanwhile, I spent most of my high school years memorizing quotes from Steel Magnolias. I’m just saying there’s a spectrum.
When I started getting all these invitations for Ivy League race parties, I got really nervous. Was I the black they were looking for? I wanted to just go to the white weekends, which were always separate. I mean, everyone could go to the white weekends, so they weren’t technically white. They were “neutral.” It seemed like less trouble, to be honest. I’d been hanging out with white people my whole life; was I suddenly going to become Angela Davis in college? I was doubtful. I was not quite sure how to locate my blackness, but I knew that my blackness was definitely not whiteness.
I wanted to be part of the experiences of my people, but a lifetime of feeling slightly uncomfortable all the time suggested that this was not in the (race) cards. I began to realize that I’d built my conception of my racial identity on neutrality and that that didn’t jibe with the way the world was going to relate to me. That’s why I’d felt out of place in our all-black church, where the choir swayed in the rhythm and people caught the spirit and I quietly observed. And that’s why I’d felt ill-suited to lead the Black Awareness Club (but still ran for president of it because she loves a well-stacked résumé!). Who was I to tell anyone what blackness was? I didn’t know and I couldn’t figure out how to find out.
So, true to my nature as someone who literally cannot decide if he wants to be in or out (see also: closets, conference calls, the workforce, church choir, fashion), when it came to the colleges, I went to the all-students weekends at Brown and Princeton and the students-of-color weekends at Columbia and Cornell. At Cornell, my host—a student named Fredo—made me sleep under his bed and told me there was a race war on campus, so I shouldn’t talk to any white people. The marching band was really great, though, so all in all it was a fine experience. A little Malcolm X-y, a little Music Man-y. What more could you want?
I know you’d like more information on this race war situation. Honey, so would I! Fredo was a light-skinned dude with skinny braids lining his scalp. He had no posters on his walls and literally the only thing he said to me was, “I have no room in here. This is a single. You have to sleep under the bed. There’s a race war going on. Don’t talk to any white people.” So I didn’t! I mean, would you? People would be coming up to me, asking me where I was from, offering to tell me about their majors and the clubs they were in, and I’d just shake my head like “You ain’t bamboozling me, whitey.”
It was a really rich experience.
At Princeton, I learned you had to join a club in order to eat! Have you heard about this? Many people have tried to explain this to me over the years, but I refuse to retain anything more than this: In lieu of meal plans, they have eating clubs. They’re like fraternities. You join one and maybe live there and also eat all your meals there. “What if no one accepts you into their club?” I asked the tall, ruddy white tour guide on Princeton’s campus. He stared at me like I was speaking French and then mumbled an answer which I also refused to retain. I kept imagining myself wandering Princeton’s campus, emaciated and desperate because I had failed to find my people. I am not interested in joining anything ever anyway, and now I was going to have to die for it. This put Princeton in the maybe category.
At Columbia, where I would eventually enroll, they put a whole bunch of us in the Pan-African House, which was a two-floor dorm apartment. What I remember most vividly is sleeping on the floor of the common room while a bunch of black people watched a bootleg copy of The Matrix. On the Huxtable scale of blackness, the experience was a solid Denise.
The part of my brain that is constantly constructing and deconstructing a time machine wonders a lot about the choice I made. Ultimately, I think I was most beguiled by Columbia because of New York. I felt compelled by the city in a way I didn’t understand. Its limits and its definitions were attractive but ambiguous, and I was drawn, most of all, to the mystery. I didn’t have those words then, of course. All I knew was I had to leave my home and see Broadway shows and meet people who told witty stories about international travel and perhaps dye my hair or consider a piercing at once if not sooner. At this evening’s performance, the role of R. Eric Thomas will be played by Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird.
Having arrived on campus—in a full moving truck! God bless my long-suffering parents and their tireless commitment to their eccentric Auntie Mame son—I was unsure what I was supposed to…do. I was ostensibly part of a class, a school, a culture, a race, a city, but determining what that meant or where the entry point was proved to be a challenge. I realized I had never thought about what college was for. College was just the thing you did at the beginning of the montage, and at the end of the montage you’re Toni Morrison. That was my whole plan: be Toni Morrison. Why didn’t I just go to Princeton, where she taught at the time? Because it seemed super white, if you want the truth. And I didn’t want to starve to death.
Columbia offered a regular meal plan that didn’t require having any aptitude for social interactions, so I went there.
During my first week of school I received an email about the first meeting of the Black Student Union. I stared at the screen, once again not comprehending. Was this for me specifically? What did they want from me? How did they know I was black? Was I being catfished? And for what purpose? Is this how they got my ancestors on the ships—invitations to club meetings sent by email? Plausible. I told myself that I wouldn’t be joining the Black Student Union at Columbia because I never wanted to participate in any activity ever. Honestly, I was just nervous that there was going to be a quiz. Even though I’d been president of the Black Awareness Club in high school, there were few black students in my year and one of my science classes included whale-watching in Provincetown, so it wasn’t exactly Wakanda. The Columbia BSU felt markedly different from the Black Awareness Club, like I was stepping into the major leagues after hanging out on the farm team for years. There’d only been maybe ten of us in the club, a quarter of them white. The BSU filled a classroom and included undergrads and grad students. There was something about it that communicated Official Blackness to me.
When I got the email about the first BSU meeting at Columbia, I leaned out of my dorm window to look at the space in the basement of Hamilton Hall where it would be held, as if the opaque windows of the building would reveal how African American this experience was going to be. “Bring your kufi, we going in!” I ended up walking by it a day later when the meeting was about to start, searching the faces of the people walking in for a hint of acceptance or judgment or betrayal. They didn’t seem to notice me.
And so I went about my year, avoiding the BSU and instead making a group of friends so diverse we could have starred in an early-2000s Disney Channel show. Looking back, particularly at the group of students that comprised my first-year suite, it’s almost a parody of Benetton-ad realness. We spanned races, cultural backgrounds, nationalities, abilities, and sexual orientations. A blind Persian boy with a love for N.W.A. lived next door to an out gay boy from Staten Island with a Nick Carter haircut and a stereo that constantly played club music; across the common room was a willowy French Canadian girl who seemed bemused by all of our interactions and in my memories is always in pajamas; catty-corner to her, a goth girl with a huge comics collection and a devotion to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We were all, to some extent, friends by nature of proximity, and they formed the basis for the friendships I sought out as the year progressed. And in those groupings, I was nominally black but not, you know, officially African American. Or so I thought.
However, the facts were these: I had a merit-based scholarship that was earmarked for students of color; I was, mysteriously, on the BSU mailing list; and, at some point in the application process, I had self-identified as Vanessa Huxtable and some admissions officer had puzzled over that for a hot minute and then finally marked my race down in a file somewhere. And while I thought that my race was incidental information in my friend groups and in my place at the school, as time went on it kept popping up in odd but consequential ways.
I feel like I should give you a little context right now: When I started at Columbia, the president of the university was a guy named George Rupp. This was in 1999. I never met George Rupp and I actually had to look this information up because I am not a podcaster named Alex and, apparently, I didn’t pay enough attention to important things like knowing the name of the president when I was in college. Ah, well. You can’t learn everything. That’s going to be the motto of my college when I start one: Thomas University—you can’t learn everything!
Anyway, George Rupp announced his retirement in March of 2001 and was succeeded, in 2002, by Lee Bollinger, who’d previously been the president of the University of Michigan. Neither of these men had too direct an impact on my life—in fact, by the time Lee Bollinger officially began his tenure I was already at a different school. However, the important thing about Lee Bollinger here is not so much what he did at Columbia but what he did before. In 1997, a student named Barbara Grutter sued the University of Michigan Law School, and then-university-president Lee Bollinger, because Grutter had been denied admission in 1996. She surmised that her earned spot had been taken by a less qualified student who was admitted through affirmative action. The case that she brought contended that the affirmative action policy was unconstitutional, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court eventually ruled in the school’s favor but, obviously, as you are reading this in a less affirmative, more inactive future, the policy would remain contentious and would continue to be chipped away at for years.
So, when I first arrived at Columbia, Grutter v. Bollinger had just started making its way through the lower court system and affirmative action was all anybody seemed to want to talk about. It was a hot-button topic on the news, it was widely discussed on campus, and it was a question that hung, in my experience, over every admission. Once I was walking through campus with a friend and he asked me what I got on my SATs, which is the sort of question that is only not insanely random for a few years of your life. It’s odd, this period during which the prevailing assessment of your academic potential (and worth as a candidate for a successful future) is contained in a number that seems to be everyone’s business. It’s like there was a Freedom of Information Act request filed by all the people at your church, your parents’ jobs, your school, and any random truck stop.
Anyway, even though this was late in my first year and I had begun to suspect that my worth wasn’t bound up in those four digits, I wasn’t totally sure about that, so I told him. Offhandedly, he said, “Oh, you must be affirmative action.” And then he kept talking about the paper we had to write on Song of Solomon.
Sometimes I think about the nonchalance of his assessment and that stings me; sometimes I think about the haze of confusion that settled around me as we continued to walk through the sunny springtime campus and that brings me low. Sometimes what sticks is just being asked the question at all and having a simple fact be a trap that I could so guilelessly walk into. A trap that hadn’t been set by an individual but rather by a circumstance.
These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.
All my life I’d operated under the assumption that there were many kinds of blackness. I saw the variety of experiences on campus, in the church congregation at home, at family reunions. And I assumed that eventually I’d learn how to navigate them, to feel comfortable in spaces where I felt not black enough or the wrong kind of black. Or, if I didn’t learn to navigate them, I thought, perhaps this wider exposure at Columbia could offer me a path to change. I could be a different kind of black. But in that passing moment, during the conversation about the SATs, it occurred to me that no matter where I was, perhaps there was only one kind of black.
From then on, everything about Columbia had an asterisk for me. Everyone, from the faceless admissions officers to the Black Student Union to my friend, seemed to have a more accurate read on me than I did. I started to see myself in a kaleidoscope, dividing and doubling, going in and out of focus. Had I gotten in because of who I was or had I gotten in because of my blackness? And if I’d gotten in because of my blackness, was it an issue that I couldn’t figure out how to define my blackness or engage with it? Was it a problem that I didn’t really know who I was, black or otherwise, anymore?
When I started college, I carried with me the good wishes and hopes of the community that I came from, some who knew what an opportunity like Columbia could provide, and others—like many members of our church—who had never heard of the school before but had a blind faith that I was headed toward something extraordinary. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the way the world that I knew seemed to constantly take on new definitions and features. Sometimes piece by piece, sometimes all at once. I think the simplest way of putting it is that nothing I’d arrived thinking felt true anymore. But, I suspected, if I simply tried to ignore the shifting understanding of blackness and its connection to my sense of worth, if I never actually acknowledged this feeling, I might never have to look it or myself in the face.
Turns out I was wrong. College revealed me, suddenly, like the villain at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo. I would have gotten away with it, if only it hadn’t been for those meddling kids in the Black Student Union.