Read on Twitter
Honey, if we want to talk RACISM AND ANTI-BLACKNESS AT @EMERSONCOLLEGE I’m fully prepared to have THAT conversation. The thread cometh.
FIRST AND FOREMOST: In the spring of 2018 there was only ONE BLACK STUDENT who graduated from the Writing, Literature, and Publishing program: ME! That alone gives you a lense through which to view my ENTIRE fucket up time at Emerson
It starts 1st sem freshman yr when I was the only Black person in Intro to Poetry, writing poems about Blackness and Mike Brown who should’ve been starting college that same semester. I was met with blank stares and empty critiques that made me question my place in the program
It was week 3 or so and I was SOBBING on the phone to my sister about how no one really wanted me at Emerson and I didn’t belong and wanted to leave. If I hadn’t come across @tayjett13 and Alex Ellison tabling for EBONI at org fair, I probably would’ve dropped out then and there.
I took a class called Rethinking Race with Yasser Munif that semester and while Yasser was an EXCEPTIONAL professor, I was still the only Black person in that room full of Devils Advocates and people who could just dissociate through the material without being challenged
My freshman spring was the big student walkout and storming of the faculty assembly that birthed POWER. I may be misremembering, but I think @_doorkiss and I were the only freshmen to speak. We’d been there less than a year and had ALREADY been so disrespected we had to speak out
I don’t remember having a class with another Black person my entire freshman year. Read that back as many times as it takes before it fucking sinks in.
Sophomore fall I was at the castle and of course the only Black person in all my classes (though there was 1 other Black girl in the program) i had to take not 1 but 2 classes with Scum of the Earth Professor Richard Chetwynd
Anyone who studied abroad at Kasteel Well can tell you that Richard Chetwynd was a fucking creep who for some reason felt it was NECESSARY to bring up the Holocaust every class? He didn’t teach a SINGLE writer of color and sped through a unit on Sappho, the only non-male taught
Embracing the cliché, my time abroad was the best semester of my Emerson career, but it’s still slightly tarnished by memories of being actively belittled and talked down to by Chetwynd any time I tried to challenge his pure toxicity. I know I’m not the only one.
Soph. spring I’m back in Boston and join Kappa because I saw every single Black woman I admired on campus in that org. I wanted to be in the leagues of @hunteryharris and @thekaigrayson and @DixPeyton and @Najahknows (though she’d already graduated) THAT is what drew me to FSL
But the Kappa I joined is NOT the kappa I graduated from. I saw less and less people of color being picked for the org as years went on, which resulted in less and less people of color even coming out to join. I tried to remedy this my senior year and met resistance.
I CREATED the role of Social Justice chair in Kappa and was not given any of the time or resources I needed from the executive board to be successful. I had ideas that were put on hold, and my mental health was already at an all time low. I felt unsupported and ignored by them.
If you were on the Kappa exec board that semester, you know who you are, and I would genuinely like an apology for the lack of support I received while trying to reform that organization to be more welcoming to members of color. My DMs are entirely open.
I’m told that when I sought out a position of power in Kappa, it was said that I was unreliable because I didn’t attend every event I planned as co-recruitment chair fall of 2016, despite the fact that it was an incredibly successful recruitment. What else was I doing that fall?
I was a 1st year RA and president of EBONI with on and off campus jobs and a worsening mental health condition that drove me to daily panic attacks, one of which was SO BAD @lichtenstyle sat with me for SIX HOURS AS I LAID ON MY DORM FLOOR BECAUSE I COULD NOT MOVE OR SEE
That was the worst semester of my life and TW! I almost killed myself! I was giving SO MUCH to EVERYONE AROUND ME & receiving SO LITTLE IN RETURN. Pepper in the trauma of having recurring nightmares of white mobs in M*GA hats LYNCHING ME, and we arrive at my first hospitalization
I checked myself into MacLean hospital over thanksgiving break because I was terrified that I was going to die, one way or another. I spent a week there and told very few people. @fathertesla was the only one who visited. I came back to Emerson a week later like nothing happened.
My explanations to professors on why I needed extensions were largely met with apathy. A general sentiment of “everyone goes through SOMETHING” was shot my way. I took all incompletes, which tanked my GPA irreparably. I barely remember the rest of junior year.
By the end of that year, I was ready to drop out for real. My advisor SUGGESTED IT and I had the paperwork signed. The only reason I stayed is bc Chris Daley in Student Success sat down with me and made a plan for me to graduate on time. Everyone else was ready to throw me away.
So that semester I had to take more Incompletes, as well as a summer class that I ended up taking online during a SECOND inpatient psychiatric stay at MacLean bc I missed an end of the year appointment with ECAPS and was off my meds cold turkey that entire summer
Let me reiterate: Emerson Counseling and Psychological Services did not provide me with enough resources to find an off campus psychiatrist, so when I missed an appointment at the end of the year, I was unable to refill my antidepressants and landed back in the hospital in 2 mos
Senior year rolls by and I make one final attempt at carving out a space for myself at Emerson. I join SGA as Intercultural Comissioner, I started Slow Food Emerson in an attempt to discuss food inequality on campus, I help found an advocacy group for RAs who felt unsupported
I also wanted to pursue an independent study exploring the food culture of the African diaspora across each continent, but this project was blocked by my academic advisor because I didn’t have a 3.0 gpa. Hmm, I wonder why!
Not a single goddamned thing I did mattered because at this point Emerson had broken me so badly that I couldn’t be bothered to care anymore. We had ANOTHER FUCKING WALK OUT ABOUT RACISM IN CLASSROOMS. I had back spasms that day and still got out of bed to speak.
And for all of my labor and trauma at @EmersonCollege what did I get? I piece of paper, zero job prospects, and some shiny stoles and tassels. Oh yeah, and $40k of debt. I’m still too traumatized to write for publication because I’m afraid I’m not good enough.
