Black in the Orange Bubble

"Late meal is like Chocolate City,” Brittney Winters ’09 said, laughing. “It’s actually becoming a running joke within the black community: [If you] can’t find someone, just go to late meal.”

The crowd of black undergraduates who congregate in the West TV Lounge in Frist Campus Center during late meal may all have checked the same box on their Princeton applications, but the black community on campus is not a self-segregated monolith, several students said.

For many black students at Princeton, college presented the first opportunity for them to interact with a large African-American community in an academic setting, they said.

Some black students, like Miriam Camara ’10, said they went to high schools where the majority of students were white and that they were often the only black face in Advanced Placement and honors classes.

Camara, whose mother is from Haiti and father is from Guinea, was born and raised in New York and attended Staten Island Academy, which she called “100 percent white.”

During one high school dance, she said, when a popular rap song came on, the dance floor cleared because her fellow classmates expected her to break out dancing because she was black.

During her freshman year at Princeton, Camara said that it turned out many of the African-American friends she made had similar high school experiences.

“To have other people to share that relationship with was so therapeutic for me,” she said.

Like Camara, Shannon Walker ’11 said she only had white friends in high school. She added that she believes many of the black students on campus who have mainly black friends went to primarily white high schools.

Walker said that as a freshman, the majority of the friends she made were black. She added that this was not intentional.

“I never really had a desire to have more black friends than white friends,” she explained. “Looking back on it, it kind of upsets me that I do … because that’s never who I’ve really been.”

Walker said she made friends freshman year mainly with people who lived with her in Wilson College and others who came to events hosted by the Black Student Union (BSU).

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“My family is black, obviously, so it’s not like I had been, like, ‘Oh, I’ve never been around black people, I’ve been so deprived,” Walker said. “I’ve got to go try to make friends with every black person I’ve been with.’ ”

Camara, however, said that when she arrived at Princeton, one of her “primary goals” was to make black friends because socializing with white students came “so naturally” to her and because she wanted the chance to “challenge” herself.

“I have never had the opportunity to build relationships with other people like me,” she said. “I wanted to immerse myself in a community that I felt like an outsider of coming up in high school because it felt like I wasn’t … ‘ghetto enough’ to be a forceful part of the black community.”

Jerome Jackson ’11 also said he wanted to interact more with the global black community at Princeton, coming from a private high school where he was one of only ten black students.

“Everyone is from a whole bunch of different places,” he said. “They’re from different states or countries because the black community is made up of more than just African-Americans. There are Africans and people from the Caribbean and all that good stuff.”

Nene Umoren ’10, a native of Nigeria, said that though many of her closest friends on campus are of Nigerian descent, their worldviews are still dramatically different from hers since they were born in the United States.

“While a good majority of my friends all look like me, we don’t have the same background,” she explained.

Walker said that despite the diversity of the black community, other students often seem to view it as a single, monolithic group.

“When black people are grouped together, we look more like a collective unit, which we aren’t,” she explained.

This diversity provides the rationale for the several black students to resist the characterization of their TV lounge crowd as self-segregated.

“My philosophy is this: If you go to Princeton, it’s asinine to suggest that you’re self-segregating,” former BSU president Dwight Draughon ’09 said. “It is possible for a white student to only hang out with white students at Princeton and never really interact with anybody else. It’s not possible for a black person to do that.”

Draughon noted, though, that non-black students rarely attended BSU events while he served as the organization’s president. Though the gatherings are not intended exclusively for black students but rather for the general public, they are about celebrating black culture, and students who are not black rarely stepped “out of their comfort zone” to attend, Draughon said.

“We may have a Chinese student one year or a Latino student one year, but never white students,” he explained.

He added that he thought the black community was on the wrong side of an unfair double standard on the issue of self-segregation.

“There’s the expectation that blacks, to not self-segregate, have to reach out as if we’re not already reaching out by being at Princeton,” he said. “But there’s never the counterargument: Well, why aren’t you reaching out to blacks?”

Walker also noted that visual perceptions of self-segregation on campus can be problematic.

“I think it looks bad when you see a table of black students sitting together because it is very obvious that they’re all black,” she said. “People don’t realize the fact that every other table is all white just because it’s not as blatant.”

Winters also said she thought physical appearances were the main catalyst for accusations of self-segregation.

“It’s only because our skin color is so visible and so starkly different from everybody else that you can say we’re self-segregating,” she said. “Really, we’re just branching out to people who are really very much different from us, it just so happens that we fall in the same range of color.”

Brandon Bell ’11, who also said the majority of his friends are black, explained that his social group evolved “naturally.”

“When I came here, it just kind of seemed like I was self-segregating in a way, but I didn’t really think it was that, it was just finding a familiar face,” he said.

Thursday, July 24

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