Afros and high tops tend to tower over the less-voluminous masses. Dreadlocks inspire stares. In general, “kinky” or curly locks garner attention, usually of the negative or ignorant sort. In America, the public display of black person’s natural hair has always caused uneasiness. For many non-black people (particularly whites), natural black hair is a frightening, politically-charged declaration of “otherness.” But does it have to be that way?
A couple weeks ago, a friend showed me a video made by Sy Stokes, an undergraduate student at UCLA. In his video, Stokes voices his concerns about the scarcity of black male undergraduates at UCLA. The three-minute long video rifles through some jaw-dropping enrollment statistics, the most shocking of them being that UCLA has more NCAA championships than black male freshman; black male freshmen compose only 3.3% of the undergraduate student body. After watching the video, I wondered how Princeton’s enrollment statistics for black male undergraduates would compare. So after dinner one night, I sat down with a couple friends and counted the number of black male undergraduates at Princeton (yes, I actually did this). The results were shocking. We counted a total of 169 students: 48 freshman, 42 sophomores, 44 juniors, and 35 seniors. 169 out of a 5,222 student body, a measly 3.2%. Continue reading
Concrete walls, bars over the windows and a lot of black faces. In September, I taught a course with other Princeton students at a male youth correctional facility in New Jersey that fit this description. For a few hours every Friday, I could get over everything that made me uncomfortable – except the black faces, because they knew I was black, too. Continue reading
“Why do all the black people on campus know each other?”
This in an unnerving question, because I feel that not everyone is equally subject to this interrogation. I wonder what the person is really asking, and why he or she seems so interested in my friend group and their racial background. The rest of this piece is dedicated to explaining why I have ultimately concluded that I have no obligation to answer this question. Continue reading
Yellow Fever. Jungle Fever. No, University Health Services has not begun a prevention campaign against a new illness, but these ailments are spreading quickly and are highly contagious. I am talking about racial fetishes. The terms “yellow fever”, “jungle fever” and other equivalent terms are used to describe an attraction to a particular race. In a society attempting to rectify mistakes of the past we must work to eliminate the use of these terms because at their core they are discriminatory. Consider the term “yellow fever”. If I heard this without any context of the conversation I would assume someone contracted something vile and repulsive. That is exactly what fetishes do. It takes a person that can be viewed in a beautiful way and in turn objectifies and diminishes the value of the people that are being fetishized. Discrimination removes the individual and replaces it with a standardized version of who someone should be according to generalizations. Having a racial fetish is the same thing as discriminating. Continue reading
A constant struggle for American people of color engaged with race issues has been inspiring empathy and action from largely unaffected whites. The lethal combination of institutional power and racial prejudice does not not follow white footsteps nor hang in the back of white minds. For white Americans, racism remains something we at most witness, our experience limited to the merely vicarious. Even dedicated white allies have the luxury of forgetting about racism when it becomes overwhelming or inconvenient. There is no immediacy of impact, and for many of us, that means no pressing reason to care. Continue reading
Having only lived for 20 years, with the bulk of those years spent in a behind-the-times rural community, I haven’t had much opportunity to directly experience cultural development. In other words, only on rare occasions was I ever cognizant of my cultural surroundings – the food we ate, the music we liked, the way we spoke – and their tendency to change or develop. Within the past year, however, nearly all of America (young and old) bore witness to a thrust of cultural development directly in the public view. It was a physical thrust, one which began in Miley Cyrus’s lower hips and landed in Robin Thicke’s groin during MTV’s 2013 Video Music Awards. Continue reading
It wasn’t until I went to an exclusive, conservative, and predominately white university that I was first called “sassy”. Back home in my small New Jersey town, friends and family alike considered me to be a highly opinionated person. If you ever wanted to know my perspective on a certain issue, I would let you know without any filters. Continue reading
With a biracial president and a demographic that has, according to the 2010 Census, grown by 32% in the last decade, multiracial Americans are receiving more attention than ever before. In a drastic shift from the society that considered mixture of races a taboo subject just decades ago, artists now document multiracial lives with ventures like Jenna Park’s The Mixed Race Project (which captures the lives of multiracial families across the country) and Martin Schoeller’s The Changing Face of America (which compares multiracial individuals’ self-identification to their census identification). So why is there still no official platform for the mixed race voice? Continue reading
From the exchange of hostile attacks and impassioned defenses over Lena Dunham’s Girls and its lack of minority characters, to the controversy over the delegation of barbarian and slave roles to mainly non-white actors on HBO’s Game of Thrones, conversations about the representations of people of color (POC) on screen have been heating up. Continue reading
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