This weekend, the Black Student Alliance hosted their first ever Black and White Tie Affair, with months of planning, hiring, and finalizing the last minute details, the event was held in the Great Room of the Edward J Pryzbyla.
The Black Student Alliance is an organization that works to integrate black culture into the Catholic University of America’s campus. As a member of BSA and also the media and advertisement coordinating chair, having the Black and White Tie Affair and making sure it was a successful event was very important to me, as well as the rest of the executive board. CUA also let me and my co chair Matt run the school’s official snapchat account for the night . Everyone one knows how much I love being the center of attention, so to have hundreds of people watching what I was doing was pretty awesome.
The month of February, being Black History Month is usually a very busy month for BSA as we try to encompass as many black culture centered events as we can into that time frame. The Black and White Tie Affair is something new that we wanted to do also as a way to celebrate the different cultures that our organization is made up of including African, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean. It was important for us to show all of CUA that BSA is more than just a bunch of black people hanging around, we are a group of students who love our culture, where we come from, and who we are.
The Black and White Tie Affair was nothing shy of what we thought it was going to be. Though there were a few technicalities throughout the night, we could not have asked for a better event. My friend Jenai and I sang the black national anthem, Lift every voice, and slayed if I may say so myself. We also have other cultural groups on campus perform various dances including the Student Organization of Latinos and Filipino Organization of Catholic University Students. A student from American University recited original spoken word and brothers from omega psi phi fraternity also known as the Ques stepped for us. Having the Ques come to our event was really exciting because it allowed people to see the importance and brotherhood of black fraternities.
We are so fortunate to have had this opportunity to showcase to the rest of the CUA community what make the Black Student Alliance so special. I can only hope that it will become an annual event and continue to thrive.