If you are part of a minoritized group of people and you go to Pitt, you may have noticed that the campus is lacking — not in ‘cultural’ clubs, themed nights or events that go on around campus. No; what Pitt’s campus seems to lack is the drive to build space for black and brown women.
“But Monica you work in residence life. All you do is try and create space, right? Like isn’t that what you’re all about?”
Well, yes, you would be right, but what myself and many of my friends have noticed is that there is a complete lack of support for black and brown women here at Pitt. On a campus where we cannot see our backgrounds reflected in our classmates, and in the people who work to teach us, it is exhausting to be the ones who must educate friends, acquaintances and sometimes adversarial classmates on the experience of not being white in America. It is difficult to attend school when you cannot see the women before you who have already done it and thrived. Academia was built to be classist and the admissions process in and of itself is racially biased if you’ve been paying attention.
But that topic is for another article. This article is about what happens when a place is lifted out of the ground so that the connections you have craved can be realized.
In its second year of realization, The Beautiful Summit was held by a few different Pitt offices and programs to create a place of communion for black and Latinx women on Pitt’s campus. For $5, anyone (including non-black or non-Latinx allies) could visit this summit, listen to speakers, participate in activities and have a full meal. And while all of these things are amazing, the most incredible part was hearing speakers in a fairly intimate setting, and being encouraged and affirmed in things that many people in the room may have thought were just normal, painful experiences. The day ended with an amazing panel made up of our speakers and other professors and leaders in the Pitt community. Incredibly so, many of the women who were in attendance became incredibly vulnerable with the group, sharing hardships they had faced, sharing hurts they had endured and offered advice to help people heal and move on with power. How were these leaders able to do it?
There were two points during the summit where I was taken aback, and really made to think on my life here at Pitt. And though this may seem rather melodramatic, it really made me think about how I operate in my space here.
In college, we often change a lot. We are out of our parents’ house, we make our own rules, we mesh with our friends, we learn new things and create these new people we call ourselves. And in this context, these past few months I have been trying to analyze who I have become. Is it someone I know? Is it someone who makes me happy? Have I changed myself into someone who is more palatable to the Pitt lifestyle?
Though this may be seen as nepotism, I found myself engaged in a presentation that my boss, Carolina Roasario-Mozee had given on something I hadn’t thought about in a really long time: “community care.” Juxtaposed to the self-care that we see on Instagram activists’ timelines, community care functions in a different way. Where self–care asks you to keep your mess to yourself, put a face mask on and instantly feel better, community care goes much deeper. In receiving community care, our “people” rally around us—not only encouraging us, but taking the baggage of life off of our shoulders— grabbing us food when we can’t seem to manage to find the time to sit and eat, listening to our struggles and keeping it real when the world seems to be falling apart. Community care is not allowing ourselves or our people to be left to do all of the hard things in life alone. In her presentation, Carolina mentions, “This is something that black, Latinx, and indigenous groups have been doing for centuries. It just hasn’t been considered within academic literature.”
And you can see it on campus. There have been so many times when I have talked to students and they have poured out their hearts, so scared of being alone. We have taught people that if they ask for help, they will be seen as weak. They’re told that they can’t handle college if they start to ask for help. In a school as academically competitive as Pitt, it is absolutely terrifying to reach out to someone, even in your own circle, and just say, “Hey, I’m really going through it. Can you help me?”
But it does not have to be like that. We have the power to change that narrative, to build up our own communities and realize that any perceived competition is not worth anything in the long run. Any competition that we may have created will not matter in 5-10 years; so why even suffer through the isolation of academic rigor?
As I prepare to leave Pitt, and venture off into wherever I am being led, I do believe that this summit was something I needed to go to. As I move onto the next stages of my life, I will see parts of myself change into something new. In a meeting with Carolina, she said to me, “Monica will always be changing. Sometimes parts of her will change, others will not. Sometimes you’ll pick up things from old Monica that you had dropped before. It will all be wonderful.”
I feel invigorated coming out of this experience. I feel the desire to work in my community and to reach out and care for others, as others have also cared for me, to lift others up as the women before me did, and as the women after me will do. In this space, I met women who came in with this same desire, and who left ready to do good work.
It was beautiful.