Being a black girl, on a campus where 11.6% of other students look like you, is hard. Like scary hard. Whether you’re in class, an extracurricular activity, or even a party, it feels like everywhere you look around you can’t see anyone you can relate to. I first noticed I was the only black girl in my Legal Environment of Business class at the beginning of the ffall semester. Walking in with everyone staring at you is already awkward, but everyone in my class was either white or the occasional black male.
In class, it became normal for me to be the only black girl around. Going to fraternity parties with my white friends was a whole different story. I had always heard the rumors of other black college girls saying that men (even black men) primarily prioritize white girls, reinforcing the stereotype that black women are “bottom of the barrel,” the unwanted side characters. Seeing it firsthand, the assertion rings true. Experiencing guys shooing me away in favor of my friends was humiliating. Once I realized this, getting cute to “meet guys” stopped becoming an option for me very quickly. This toxic environment eventually became torture for me, leaving me wondering what I was doing wrong when, in reality, it was just the color of my skin.
As I asked around in black circles, I realized that I’m not the only girl that feels this way. A lot of black women I’ve talked to told me that they’ve been called offensive things such as “chocolate princess” or “Nubian queen.” I don’t know in what world these are compliments, but it seems like many men were taught that it was okay to speak this way. At the beginning of the fall semester of my freshman year, I was asked by a local bouncer to hook up with him because “he had never been with a black girl before.” He treated me like an exotic animal, and behavior like that makes those scenes unsafe for black women. You never know if someone is going to come up to you and stroke your hair like a pet or call you inappropriate names in front of your friends. Black women are readily ridiculed by our peers daily, and it has to stop.
This feeling of unwantedness is not readily understood by many white women because of their inherent privilege in these spaces. I’m not saying it isn’t hard for white women to date. However, I’m saying that black women oftentimes are neglected and intentionally excluded in these primarily white spaces. My fear of being in these white spaces was solidified when seeing text screenshots from members of Alpha Phi Sorority, a primarily white sorority on campus, saying that it smells like a “black girl” in the space they were in. Other sorority members validated the insult by saying we were “stinky.” The inexcusable actions by the women involved were in turn mishandled by Alpha Phi’s leadership, as the organization gave a half-sorry apology with no real action taken.
While being a black woman is already hard enough, not being adequately defended by our white counterparts makes it even harder to exist on campus. I wish that black women will be fully protected in society, especially young adult women. The stories I’ve seen and heard make this hope bleak.