Day 3
Is competition healthy? Growing up poor is an automatic entry into a race for success. As soon as you acknowledge that you don’t have what someone else does, you begin running. Other factors determine your advantages and disadvantages in the race. Imagine being a poor black woman in the race and all the obstacles you have to jump over and conquer just to continue running and tumbling. Imagine running for your life in a race that has only one winner. You want a better life. Find something to do and master it—that’s what I’ve told myself from a young age. So, here I am at college. This is the race.

Sitting in class I think about my privileges as an art student. There are no limitations or rules to art. Self expression is the only way to document human existence, so how can I go wrong with that? Everything I learn here can contribute to my art while also helping me make sense of life. A common question I’m faced with is, “Why art?” It makes sense why people ask. I mean, if you’re going to make a living creating, I guess you need an explanation for why you want to in the first place.

So: Art is free. All great artists break boundaries, escape expectations, and remove fear from their vocabulary. Artists don’t comprehend routine. Routine is structure. Structure has failed society time and time again. We learn about societal constructs all the time in class—race, gender, ethnicity, marriage. All these things were created long ago to bring structure to society. However, that structure is the reason for our problems today. There was once a time when the academy taught that the structure of society should be: God, Man, Woman, and Animal. Placing men above women was the norm. There was a time before that when caste systems were taught in classrooms, placing one group of people over the other based on differences and assignments, labels given to them by society.

All of these ways of thinking were once validated and spread by professors and leaders in society, so it became engraved in our minds. Now I sit in my classes and realize the power the professor has to influence a society’s thinking as a whole. In Africana Studies, we learn, there are no differences between us, “blacks and whites.” Those differences were simply constructed to place blacks at the bottom of the caste system so that there would be a source of labor. The importance of that information goes beyond this classroom. This information totally disproves white superiority. However, it does not erase white privilege. Although I have these amazing revelations in Africana, it is only because of my professor’s ability to share everything she knows with us.

Being an art student here has its ups and downs. For one, the school is way too big to just bump into other people who like art. I tried the traditional way, joining clubs and attending events the campus has to offer. I started to notice that the black population in the art department here is very small. It’s so bad that, when I showed up to a meeting about joining the art newspapers on campus, everyone seemed shocked to see me there. I looked across the room and saw smirks and questionable-looking faces. I had seen a few black students in the Fine Arts classes and in some places in the building, so why not here?

There’s definitely a huge divide within the different clubs and organizations on campus. It’s almost as if there are “black activities” or “white activities,” and art is simply not big enough in “black culture” on this campus to be showed more love. There are step teams, dance teams, activism, poetry clubs, but no mention of a collective of people of color who are pursuing or at least generally interested in art. I tried to settle for being involved in fashion on campus and not even those clubs are inclusive! There’s literally different fashion clubs hosted on campus by different groups, such as the Diversity Club (full of white people), the Black Student Union, the African Student Organization, and a Fashion Runway club.

I sit in my next class, a research writing class, in which I am the only black student out of a class of 16. One of my classmates gets ready to present his research on the relationship between divorced parents and crime rates in teenagers. His first supporting paragraph begins, “Former President Barack Obama, in a speech given on Father’s Day in 2008, criticizes black fathers who abandon their children. We are very quick to criticize society as a whole for today’s problem with America’s youth. Groups like Black Lives Matter point fingers at the state for their problems, yet the issues are in the bad neighborhoods.” I expected an interruption from my professor or maybe miraculously another classmate, but no.

He continues to read his essay and as soon as he finishes I feel everyone’s eyes on me. I look over at my professor to give him a chance to realize how furious I was from this reading, but he pays no attention. I feel all the pressure in that moment to correct all the misinformation just delivered at the front of the classroom. I raise my hand in fear. Everything I know about black life in America and what I’ve learned in my other classes began to run through my head. I can’t decide where or how to begin without being the Angry Black Girl. But then I say “fuck it,” and I tell him why he’s wrong. I feel relieved, but also, for once, empowered.

I say all of this to let you know that, despite the ups and downs, being an art student in college is amazing! Everything has a connection to my art. Every moment, every new book, even every awkward racist encounter. There is an art to living. Just the mere fact that both you and I exist is an art. It’s a simple beauty. An appreciation. The fact that we can attempt to understand each other other is an art, too. To understand the complexities in an aching heart, something both unbearable and banal. Sometimes it’s hard to understand my thought process or why it is I feel such specific pains. But art is not just an explanation or a painting; it is ongoing. ♦