Black Women In The Ivy League: "Everything's Not So Pretty At The Top"

This month, countless high school students across the country will be answering college acceptance letters making the difficult decision of what college to attend in the Fall.

If you asked my 17-year-old self the impact choosing to attend Princeton University would have on me, I probably wouldn’t have known how to answer. When I first got accepted into Princeton in the spring of 2009, I was both wildly excited yet undoubtedly naive. I thought I had all the “prep” I would need, having attended a well-regarded college preparatory school in Englewood, NJ for six years. I’d already experienced the doubts from my fellow high school classmates as the news spread that me and my best friend Amina (also a woman of color) had been the only people to be accepted into Princeton from our school. I’ll never forget how one girl made the inauspicious suggestion that we both got in only because we were black. In essence, I thought I had already experienced the “culture shock” and racism that occurs when you take a girl accustomed to a majority minority classroom and throw her into a world where she is the outlier, one of only a few people of color in her class.

I envisioned Princeton as being a place for self-discovery. A place to explore new interests. A place to meet lifelong friends. While all these turned out to be true, I didn’t expect how much pressure it would mean to be part of the country’s elite or one of the “future leaders of the world”(as I had been primed to think of myself during Princeton’s freshman orientations).

The common narrative regarding men and women of color getting into prestigious institutions such as Princeton and the other Ivy Leagues is often guided by words of congratulations, praise, and accomplishments. For the skeptics and naysayers, notions of affirmation action, discrimination against “better-suited” candidates, and non-worthiness often take premise. Take the recent media attention Kwasi Enin, the Ghanian-American New Yorker who got into all eight Ivy Leagues, garnered. I am proud of Kwasi but as an Ivy League alum, I know that whatever decision he makes, he is about to embark on a long journey which may be filled with  justifying his presence to both himself, his peers and outsiders. I can only imagine how this will inform his sense of self. Even more, he is still a black man to larger society (despite how he self-identifies)… and we all know being a black man in America is difficult enough.

As for me? I do not regret attending Princeton. I made some of my best friends there. I had the opportunity to take classes with the great Cornel West. I helped revamp, run and grow the Princeton Caribbean Connection, a major student organization within the Black community. I tutored inmates studying for their high school diplomas, studied Sociology with the greats, and wrote a 112 page senior thesis on a topic dear to my heart: policing in my hometown of Orange, NJ. But most of all, I rediscovered and lived out my passion for dance when I joined BAC Dance Company my freshman fall. I worked hard and graduated cum laude.

Through all of this,  I experienced some of the hardest moments of my life while a student at Princeton. I dealt with personal tragedies, sickness, and familial troubles. Though I always tried to carry a smile, I often had bouts of loneliness and crippling self-doubt, unbeknownst to even some of my closest friends. I had to learn how to navigate and often exclude myself from the dominant social scene that I had no desire to join. But should I blame Princeton, the institution, for this? That’s something I often find myself grappling with. I know that the social isolation and exclusion I faced here is not only inherent to Ivy League universities. Countless women of color across American institutions find themselves in situations like this.

One of the hardest things for me was having to face my dual realities. While at Princeton, I lived in the “Orange Bubble” shielded from life’s every day harsh realities. Yet, whenever I went home or saw my friends  who “hadn’t made it,” I had to come to grips with the realization that not everyone is given such opportunities in life. I often struggled with the feeling of not exactly knowing how to give back to my community (and those who had built the way for me), especially feeling like I had to live up to the fact that people saw me as an “inspiration.” At times, it felt like too much, like there was no room to fail. That I had to always perform to the best of my ability. Sometimes I found myself wondering what the purpose of this all was.

Attending an institution such as Princeton can bear a lot of weight on the soul with little opportunities to share experiences with those beyond one’s inner group. I side with I, Too, Am Harvard’s statement that black students’ “voices often go unheard.”

These are the stories several women shared with me  about what it feels like to be a woman of color at an Ivy League institution. I am not sharing these stories to say that these are the only important stories relevant to being a student at an Ivy League university. However, I do believe they highlight and share a common thread, which is similar to many college students nationwide: self-discovery. While we praise students of color for accomplishing such great academic feats, we must not forget about the personal journeys and experiences with academia, sexuality, mental health, class, race, gender, and self that will undoubtedly come next for them in their college journey. These women bring up issues that are important for all to consider when we think of what it means to be have a college education or be a college-educated woman. From the classroom, to the dorm room, to the inner-being, while not all negative, everything’s not always so pretty at the top.

Scroll through the pages, read and respect these women’s stories.

On the QUALITY OF EDUCATION:

“It’s still so hard for me to unpack all of my feelings about this place. My biggest issue is that the race/gender/sexuality, etc. climate seeps into the classroom. My issue was that in precepts and lectures, conversations were so stunted and limited. I literally had to sit in classes at the #1 institution in the world and hear students talk about Africa as if it were one country (or,  talk about Brown v. Board as if it ended racism.) How can an Economics or Politics class claim to be in-depth if it ignores the fact that the West “won” as an actual political and economic power used to exploit people of color and their lands? My issue is that I truly felt that as a social science major, I received a VERY limited and sanitized education.”

– Anonymous, Class of 2013, Princeton University

On THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY ON THESE CAMPUSES:

A child of the sixties and seventies, I was among the first “wave” of African-Americans to attend such institutions in our nation’s history. At Bryn Mawr College, my class of 200+ women included about 8 other women of color. That said, I loved my 4 years at BMC.  I continue to volunteer — years ago, for the admissions committee and nowadays, for class fundraising and alumnae outreach. At Columbia, I also found much to fulfill my intellect and, for the first time in higher education, I was among a large number of African-American students. I loved the parties and comraderie.  Despite my love and deep appreciation for the offerings of these two institutions, I remain conflicted. I’m thankful for my Bryn Mawr & Columbia education but even back in the day, I saw the blood oozing beneath those elitest campuses, the crosses burned on their Roman classical and Collegiate Gothic style buildings, the whip lashes scarring the European busts that adorned their prodigiously endowed libraries and plush faculty lounges. I knew even then, because my born-on-a-sharecropping-farm-in-Mississippi mother taught me to learn my history. I know that the labor and sacrifice of my enslaved African forebears is the core of those institutions. When will these institutions acknowledge them, name them, honor them?

Luvon Roberson, Master’s Degree (1985), Columbia University
On HYPER-SEXUALIZATION:

“Being a woman of color at an Ivy League was interesting to say the least. Of course the dichotomy between whether you’re a woman first or a person of color first still exists on campus just like in real life. You still get the Black men who are down for the cause but “don’t get feminism” and the white women who can’t see that feminism has to be intersectional. I also became very conscious of my double identity as both a woman and person of color because suddenly I was having experiences that were based solely on these intersections such as being involved with Princeton Association of Black Women (PABW) or being approached by drunk white men on the street saying they’d never had sex with a Black girl. Things like PABW were a blessing because they helped teach me how to navigate my identity in that way and gave me sisters who could understand the unique women of color struggle. Things like that experience on the street were in some ways a wake-up call like, “Hey, you don’t get a pass on being hyper-sexualized just because you go to Princeton, you’re still just another Black girl they wanna see twerk.”

– Liz, Class of 2013, Princeton University

On BALANCE BETWEEN SELF AND COMMUNITY:

“Being one of a few black women in an Ivy League institution is a lot of pressure at times. Often it was very frustrating because somehow I represented the thoughts, opinions, and feelings of every black woman in America – or at least that’s what many of my peers and/or professors thought. Similarly, I felt a lot of pressure from other black students to be more integrated into the community – whether it was participating in the many African/African American culture groups or even focusing on Africana Studies as a field of interest. At the end of the day, my experience at Penn was rewarding and it gave me a sense of pride to know that I was one of the few that made it, but it was definitely a delicate balancing act that many other students don’t have to deal with.”

– Allison, Class of 2013, University of Pennsylvania
On BEING HERE “ONLY FOR MY EDUCATION”:

“I always feel like I’m an outsider looking in and that I have to be on the defense because many people come with preconceived notions about black women. I’m really only here for my education. From day one, I told myself if I made lifelong friends, great, and if not, that’s fine because that’s not why I’m here. Most of my friends are black and that’s who I feel most comfortable around, but where I’m from, I hang out with people of all races. There’s a mix of socioeconomic stigmas attached to certain groups that make me stick to my own. I have no issue befriending someone of another race, but I won’t tolerate ignorance and disrespect, which I feel lies dormant in a lot of people here. I just often feel like it’s me against the privileged students of Princeton (and that goes for anyone irrespective of race.) As a black woman on this campus, I’m aware of my standing, and I’m also aware that I’m only here for a season. I do my work, enjoy the company of friends, and that is it. All of the fun really takes place when I leave the bubble of this institution.”

– Anonymous, Class of 2014, Princeton University

On FINDING COMMUNITY WITH WOMEN OF COLOR:

“The moment I stepped onto campus, black women formed the community that most sincerely wanted to know me, the community that had a vested interest in my presence at Harvard. It’s difficult to articulate but with many other social encounters, I felt I always had to take the first step and put in the most effort. I had to search for commonalities to make others feel comfortable. I had to initiate conversation. To me, the social gains of always having an event to attend or being able to stop and wave to many people on the street was far outweighed by the feeling of disingenuousness I had when I forced myself to take part in social gatherings that weren’t predominantly black. I know this has a lot to do with my experience at a prep school but there is always that palpable feeling of ‘otherness’ that I personally don’t want to deal with when I want to party and chill. It’s the feeling you get when you stand out the door of a Finals Club for 30 minutes trying to get in while groups of white girls sail past you.

That being said, being a black woman at Harvard is empowering. It’s a badge of higher intellect that can’t be discounted even when one would like to discount your gender and color. One drop of the H-bomb can eliminate most assumptions surrounding your capability. But there are still those moments when at a senior celebration dinner, the recipient of the superlative of “ funniest” makes a joke that characterizes the voice of Evelyn Hammonds, former dean of Harvard College and a tenured professor, as that of “the sassy black woman” and actually receives laughs, when you realize that this institution was never built for you. It’s in those moments where you realize that you alone are responsible for affirming your identity at a place like this. It’s for this reason that black women at Harvard stick together. We’re the only ones that can really understand each other’s experience even when it’s inexplicable.”

– Okeoma, Class of 2013, Harvard University