Preferable to Princeton

At age 13, Johnetta Pressley — now a member of the Georgetown University Class of 2003, though she was accepted to Princeton — paid little or no attention to diversity when she applied to high school.

A black student, she had been going to a middle school that was half-black and half-white, so when she began thinking about high schools, Pressley never imagined race or ethnicity to be an issue.

And it wasn't — at least not on the surface.

"You had to take the time to notice it," Pressley said during an interview conducted via e-mail. "But it was there."

Two of Pressley's black high school friends — Elizabeth Biney-Amissah '04 and Harvard sophomore James Coleman — were also accepted to Princeton.

All three had experienced racial tension at their high schools. Yet all three placed a different emphasis on the issue of race in deciding where to attend college.

And, ultimately, all reached different conclusions about which schools were right for them.

When Pressley approached the college application process four years after applying to high school, she was not as wide-eyed and naïve as she had been in eighth grade.

And Princeton reminded her too much of her high school.

Pressley had grown up in a primarily black suburb of Richmond, Va., where everybody knew one another and people left their doors unlocked. On one border was the rough edge of Richmond and on the other was Colonial Heights, or what Pressley and her friends called "Colonial Whites."

According to Pressley, Colonial Heights was slow to integrate its housing practices. And, she said, the transition was marred by people painting "Nigger" on houses and others flying Confederate flags as recently as several years ago.

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Though her larger county didn't really have any race problems, it was still a shock for her when she went to the Governor School for International Studies — a magnet public school in Richmond — which shared a building with the Thomas Jefferson School.

"The Governor School was diverse in the sense that there were lots and lots of Asians, but I think only eight black students in my entire class," recalled Pressley.

The students at Governor were predominantly white and affluent. Thomas Jefferson had an almost exclusively black population: Of 500 students, there were approximately 20 whites.

Governor School took up the top floor of the three-story building while Thomas Jefferson used the rest of the space. They shared a cafeteria on the second floor.

"While there weren't any clashes between the two populations," said Coleman, "there was definitely some tension."

The two schools were entirely separate entities with entirely separate administrations, but "there was a constant awareness of the other," Pressley said. "Some people acted like they'd never seen a black person before."

Early in her freshman year at Governor School, Biney-Amissah,was approached by one of her close white friends, Alana, who was wearing a sullen and forlorn look on her face.

"Alana had been in the girls' bathroom before class started, where all the T.J. girls who don't want to go to class hide," Biney-Amissah said. "She was putting on makeup, and a bunch of T.J. girls made fun of her."

Biney-Amissah recalled the girls saying that Alana was "a little prissy white girl."

Scared, Alana said to Biney-Amissah that she thought "her people were weird," and that they spoke "funny."

"Alana had a sheltered life, and I was really the first black person she knew," Biney-Amissah said.

Pressley tried to breach the gap between the schools when she could. She was the head of Governor's African-American culture club and ran track on one of the schools' shared athletic teams.

But she still remembers lucid examples of the tension that existed.

While sitting in Spanish class one day waiting for the bell to ring — the schools were on different bell schedules so as not to cram the hallways — the student next to Pressley kept complaining that he had to go to the bathroom. And Pressley kept replying: Just get up and go.

" 'But the mean people are in the halls,' " Pressley recalled the student saying. "I called him a moron, or something less polite, and he dug his hole even further."

" 'Oh, they won't mess with you because you're black, but they pick on us,' " she said he replied.

Coleman experienced similar tension.

"I was working on student government, and we had raised money to buy air conditioners for our classrooms," Coleman said. "We wound up installing the air conditioners in our classrooms, but there were still none in the Jefferson classrooms."

In another incident, a fellow white student at the Governor School came into school on Halloween wearing a bandanna on her head and dirty baggy jeans. When asked what she was going as, the student replied, "a T.J. student."

Though such strain between the schools was not the norm, an average of one or two comments per month was enough for Pressley, Coleman and Biney-Amissah to take notice.

"They viewed us as white smart kids," Coleman said. "And the Governor School students viewed Jefferson students as ghetto."

Beyond the more tangible race conflicts between the two schools, Pressley also became aware of the subtler racism within Governor School, especially surrounding college admissions and affirmative action.

As part of a mandatory college admissions preparatory program, Pressley's class was broken up into small workshops at the University of Richmond where they discussed applications. In one assignment, students were asked to act as the admissions board faced with 10 applicants, only four of whom the board could accept.

"Everyone but the rich white guy — who could afford to pay full tuition — was qualified, that was the premise," remembered Pressley.

The students were told that the university could not afford to offer financial aid to everyone accepted, that it wanted to increase its minority numbers and that at least one athlete had to be accepted.

After reviewing the applicants, the white student was accepted in almost all the workshops and in some groups, all the minority students were accepted.

On the bus back from the class, Pressley discussed the day with a fellow black student.

Pressley and her friend were troubled by the other students' reactions. For the most part, they were not concerned that the white student was accepted in every group — rather they were bothered that some groups had accepted all the minority students.

"Then my Indian friend spoke up — he has a fake ghetto accent which was mildly annoying since he was definitely not from the ghetto," Pressley said. "He said, 'Hey yo, but on the real, you have to admit that it's good that affirmative action will help you guys . . . Us Asians, it works against us.' "

Pressley was outraged.

"I couldn't help but yell in his face," Pressley said. "When you tell me that affirmative action will help me out, you negate every single bit of effort I put into the last four years of high school, you negate any amount of work I might have done, you negate all the positive aspects of my personality."

"I get the feeling that had my Indian friend thought about it, he would have never said what he said, but I also get the feeling that he would have continued to think it just like I'm sure other people on that bus thought it," she said.

Pressley felt she was being judged unfairly by her peers. "It was friends acting surprised that I got into Georgetown over someone else, and then getting that suspect look of 'understanding,' " she said.

"The college process is a very tense time for black students because there's that constant second guessing, that you wouldn't do on your own, but that your peers force on you," she added. "Everyone is competing for those average six slots at each prestigious school."

Pressley constantly felt a need to justify her admission to several universities.

"I have never had a white friend talk to me about wondering if they got into Princeton or Georgetown because of anything other than merit, but people always wanted me to," Pressley said.

Though Pressley was the vice president of three organizations and lettered in varsity track, "there were all sorts of tensions when acceptance time came around," she said.

When she and Coleman — the only black students to apply to Princeton from their school — were both admitted, "you better believe there were comments," she said.

"[The subtle racism] wasn't malicious, and it only came out during the 'college competition' that happens senior year," Pressley said. "But it was enough to make me tired of wealthy pompous people prejudging me . . . and in a competitive atmosphere like at Princeton — where I've heard books in the library get pages ripped out to mess up grading curves — where the people are for the most part similar in background, it reminded me too much of the Governor's School."

She did not want to repeat that experience.

Though Pressley didn't tour Princeton, she consulted former classmates and guidance counselors' recommendations about their college experiences and decisions. She spoke to her fellow classmates at the Governor School about their visits to Princeton, and she gleaned from their information that Princeton was a "pretty homogenous campus."

"Specifically, I got the impression from all those sources that the atmosphere at Princeton was sort of uniform, that people in general were well-off, and extremely competitive, which brings out the worst in people," Pressley recalled. "I spent four years at a high school full of well-off white kids, and frankly," Pressley said, "I didn't want another four-year repeat."

"Princeton's prestige also carries with it a negative tone," she continued. "There's a joke that you have to pronounce Princeton and Harvard with your nose pinched to pronounce it right."

Her friends' descriptions gave Pressley a mental picture of an Abercrombie and Fitch commercial.

But Coleman had a different image of Princeton when he visited for a week-long high school diplomat program that brought students from around the world to campus.

"All my experiences at Princeton were great," said Coleman, who is a sophomore at Harvard. "My host seemed only to have positive comments about the residential college system."

For a long time, Coleman was set on applying to Princeton. And his parents and college guidance counselors at the Governor School kept pushing the school.

Coleman flipped back and forth between Harvard and Princeton.

"I remember on one day James wore a Princeton sweatshirt and a Harvard lanyard to school," said Biney-Amissah. "If our school had valedictorians and salutatorians, Johnetta and James would have been them."

"Coleman was like the model kid," she continued. "He never said a bad thing."

Coleman, who had lived in both affluent, primarily white communities and "less economically sound" communities, tried to separate race from his college decision.

"I tried to divorce those things from my mind," Coleman said. "I tried not to let considerations of race form my college decisions."

But there was something about Princeton that Coleman couldn't quite "pin down."

"I think there is a general perception that Princeton is a bastion of old-money and socially white establishment," Coleman said. When he thought of the typical Princeton student, it was a white male preppy.

But, he added, "I guess that's pretty much what I thought about Harvard also."

Ultimately it was Cambridge and the strong politics department that drew Coleman to Harvard.

Biney-Amissah approached the college admissions process from an even more "colorblind" perspective. She consulted friends, counselors and students at college, most of whom told her "to go where she felt comfortable."

With a very open demeanor, Biney-Amissah said she felt wherever she wound up she would "find her niche and feel comfortable."

"I'm sure Johnetta would have found it here as well," she said. "I came to college not knowing what I wanted to do, and approached colleges pretty much colorblind."

For Pressley, it was not only the second guessing from her peers that bothered her. She also felt Governor School was trying to pressure her into going to Princeton. Looking back on the admissions process, Pressley felt there was too much influence — whether it was from friends like Coleman or from the school.

Pressley remembers her guidance counselor questioning her decision. Six students had been accepted to Princeton, but only one was planning to matriculate. " 'Are you sure you're making the right decision to go to GU?' " Pressley recalled the counselor saying. "Like my decision was going to mess up Governor School students in years to come when they wanted to come to Princeton and Princeton was mad at the Governor School for its low yield."

At Georgetown, Pressley has enough problems arguing with her roommate over whether to watch BET or MTV. If she had chosen Princeton, Pressley said she thought it would be a matter of explaining what BET is.

"That sort of environment is not directly racial," Pressley said. "It's more socio-economic than anything, but then again race might have something to do with that."

Though not directly confronted with racism on campus at Georgetown, "off campus, or even at the gates trying to get a cab to work, it's a completely different story," Pressley said.

"Everyone is so conscious of what they say [at Georgetown]," Pressley said, "that I don't really have to be confronted with racism on the campus."

Turning down an offer of admission from Princeton is rarely easy. But Johnetta Pressley did. And at Georgetown she found a place that was substantially different from her high school.

In her mind, that wasn't something Princeton could promise.