Stephanie Tate shared her experience with Teen Vogue as a black woman at a predominantly white school, North Carolina State University. In her article, What It’s Like to Be Black at a Predominantly White School, Tate explains how she was first set on attending a historically black college or university. She expresses her lack of resources when compared to the white students she was surrounded by in high school. Their generational wealth led them to educational ties, something she didn’t have. This idea of attending an HBCU shifted when she grew to really enjoy NC State during a tour. Once she began her college career, she indulged herself in the black community and found a sense of community within this PWI. However, this shifted as she got older and advanced in grade levels. It seemed to get increasingly worse the older she got. During one incident, Tate recounts a time when she was “shoved and called a monkey while exiting a food court on campus.” She continues, “I felt violated and unvalued.”
Whenever students of color protested, Tate describes actions that wreak of insensitivity, ignorance, and most profoundly, racism. When she discusses how students of color were told they were being too sensitive about a topic that heavily concerned themselves, she is describing an experience many white students cannot and will not experience while in college. This article can be targeted at a few different audiences. It could be targeting students of color who are deciding on what school to go to and may have doubts, students of color who are experiencing similar interactions in a PWI, and even white students who will never be able to understand what it’s like to be a minority in such an institution. There are challenges white people will never understand because of their skin color.
“In the fall semester, students were caught using the N word and speaking about bringing guns to a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in the app GroupMe. Towards the end of the fall semester, white supremacist fliers surfaced around campus and one ended up in a Nubian Message newsstand,” says Tate. The Nubian Message was an African-American newspaper at NC State. Despite experiencing such actions as described, she ends her article off by saying how with every racist incident, there are even more positives that follow. She says there are love and support from black students, faculty, and staff and that your experience at a school such as this one is what you make it. She reassures the readers that she is stronger and more resilient as a person after all of this turmoil. It’s a beautiful message for those who may feel scared and uncertain about attending a PWI and not being able to find a community there. She shows that it is possible and closes with, “At my PWI I have found a community of scholars who look like me, allies willing to stand in the gap, and a plethora of love. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
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