Months I have spent pondering and praying as it relates to where I will spend the next four critical years of my life. I have heard many perspectives.Some good. Most troubling. I have heard the usual "I want diversity, so I can't attend an HBCU," or "It's too ghetto for me." I am thankful everyday that I have a sound, rational mind on my shoulders and I did not become victim to these very common misconceptions. Now allow me to thoroughly refute each of these lies.
I'll start with the diversity concept, the following is from dictionary.com:
di·ver·si·ty
[dih-vur-si-tee, dahy-]
Show IPA –noun, plural -ties.
2.variety; multiformity.
3.a point of difference.
Unless my eyes are deceiving me, nowhere in the defintion of diversity do I see the word race. Our culture has, somehow throughout time, made race inclusive of the definition. Diversity, again is mutliformative, it can be sought through more than what meets the eye. In the fall, I will be attending an all male, African American college in Atlanta,Ga. One may be led to believe that it doesn't get more homogenous than that. But that just isn't the truth. I am entering a class of singers, thinkers, dancers, writers, poets, self-proclaimed ministers, inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs. That's variety, so that's diversity too.
Secondly, on to this "ghetto" concept:
Where is our pride? Where is our identity? Where is our contentment with who we are? I feel as though some African Americans honestly want to abandon who they are. Again, I am going to Morehouse College. I got accepted to St.John's, George Washington University, and Boston College. NO other school is going to teach me and immerse me into the culture, heritage, struggles, and triumphs of African Americans accept Morehouse or any HBCU for that matter. No other college on my list of schools was going to mold me into a social change agent, a thinker, an innovator. They weren't going to explain to me how African Americans have the highest rate of incarceration or how black men account for over half of violent crimes committed in the US. They weren't going to tell me that African Americans have the highest high school dropout rate. They weren't going to walk me through the timeline of over 400 years of plight, degradation, segregation, incarceration, false-imprisonment, slavery, beatings, lynchings, assassinations, castrations, mental and physical abuse. They weren't going to do it. So as ghetto as you may think it is.Just know that they have the same perception of you.So before you go and walk onto the beautiful campus of UGA or Stanford or BC or GWU, ponder and ask yourself, will this school instill pride in me, will it help me to appreciate ME as an African American.??
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