Originally published in Spring 2017, Issue 21.

Illustrated by Robin Weiner

As a teenager growing up in Philadelphia, Alizonaye Hardrick takes pride in her experience coming of age in a space that accepted her for who she was unabashedly. Attending KIPP DuBois College Academy prepared her to take stock in her blackness to navigate life as an adult. It is a part of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network of schools, which consists of 200 schools in 20 states plus D.C.

“I would like to say [KIPP] prepared me for [American University’s] environment, but I wasn’t really prepared to deal with white kids at my school,” Hardrick said.

KIPP is a college-preparatory public charter school in Philadelphia. According to their website, Philidelphia KIPP schools are 97 percent black.

“It did not sugar coat anything,” Hardrick, a first year studying international relations, said. “They told me that I already have the short end of the stick and I need to work 10 times as hard as anybody else because I am black and I am a female, and stereotypes are basically written all over my body.”

But this has not been her experience here.

“My high school prided itself on being a team and a family, that was one of our slogans.” Hardrick said. “But [AU] is not about being a team and a family. It is more about people. Either you agree with my views, or you’re against me––and once someone is against someone, they basically bash people and bring people down. This school is not about togetherness at all. This school is very separated.”

Some students, like Hardrick, say they experience a disconnect between AU’s rhetoric and their experiences. For a school that, according to Hardrick, touts diversity and inclusion as one of its main selling points, AU fails to deliver on these promises.

According to the 2015-2016 Academic Data Reference book, published by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, AU’s undergraduate student demographics breaks down to: 7 percent international, 11.9 percent Hispanic, 0.01 percent American Indian, 7 percent Asian American, 6.9 percent black, 58.2 percent white and 4.7 percent multiethnic.

“[Defining diversity] depends how you put it. If you base it on where people come from, yes [you have it]. For example, my roommate is white, but he grew up in Asia his entire life, and went to school in China,” Anthony Gray, a first year student studying CLEG, said. “If you do it by just race, I don’t think so at all. I kind of feel a little duped by it.”

Diversity also depends on how numbers are framed. Sometimes international students are included, sometimes they are not.

“AU has false advertisement,” Hardrick said. “They don’t tell you that until you come here and realize that ‘oh, their diversity is international students,’ when really they didn’t accept that many black kids at all, and there is nothing I can do about it because I am already enrolled in the school. … I don’t necessarily wish I could have gone to an HBCU, but I wish I went to a school that was actually diverse and not a school that falsely advertises their diversity.”

Diversity differs from inclusion. According to the Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI), diversity relates to representation. This means that, in a diverse space, students of color may still be ostracized. Inclusion can be thought of as being celebrated, welcomed and having a place on campus.

On a campus that is diverse, but not inclusive, students of color may deal with microaggressions–the casual degradation of any marginalized group that can leave some students feeling ignored, marginalized and deemed unimportant. They might also have to endure subtle or indirect remarks of discrimination or feel at odds with institutional policies.

“AU advertises diversity and inclusion, but once you come here it’s a different tune cause you’re actually living in it,” said Cory Myrtil, a first year student studying International Relations. “You realize that, what they advertised to you, might not be what you actually live in and have to go to class with.”

Defining PWIs and HWCUs

The term PWI, or predominantly white institution, is common in social justice circles. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the current president of the American Sociological Association and professor at Duke, writes that we must begin to see PWIs as “Historically White Colleges and Universities.” We sent several requests for interviews to Bonilla-Silva, but he did not respond.

Bonilla-Silva writes, “Most colleges and universities in the USA are white-oriented and white-led. … These institutions reproduce whiteness through their curriculum, culture, demography, symbols, traditions, and ecology.”

He also writes that students of color will never be welcome because they forever will be seen as “Affirmative Action babies.”

I have experienced this. I, Ofonime Idiong, am a first generation student. My father came here in the 1980s to build a better life for me and my mother. Eleven years ago my mother and I came to the U.S. I took the hardest classes I could get into. I deserve to attend AU and I share this sentiment with many other students of color: We worked hard, so we deserve to attend the best school possible. What people forgot to tell us is that it was going to be a mental challenge every day.

These tensions can be exacerbated by microaggressions in all aspects of campus life. Microaggressions can turn a school into a battleground, making students uncomfortable on a campus that does not represent them.

In 2014, the University of Arizona students held an MLK day party in which pictures surfaced on Instagram with students in saggy pants drinking out of watermelons.

In 2015, The University of Oklahoma made national news when their Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity chapter’s video leaked of them singing an old fraternity song which used the N word multiple times and featured the line, “You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with SAE.”

In 2016, AU had its own incident when a banana was thrown at a woman on campus in September. Neither the University of Oklahoma and the University of Arizona replied to multiple attempts for comment. These national incidents are not separate from the everyday microaggressions students of color face.

“My experience [at AU] has not been pleasant at all, I feel like everything is a race issue for me,” Hardrick said. “Students who are not minorities will make comments, and won’t realize that the things they say are very racist. And I have to deal with that, and once I say something about that being racist, they say that everything is not a race issue.”

Transitioning to AU

STEP stands for Summer Transition Enrichment Program. STEP is an invite-only program run by the Center for Diversity and Inclusion designed to help students transition to university. According to Shannon Smith, the Assistant Director of Student Success and Transition at CDI, STEP is part of conditional admittance. Smith started in this position in February of this year and was not involved in last year’s programming.

About 90 students receive their admittance to AU with the condition that they go through STEP. Last year, 49 students went through the program. During the seven-week residential program, students attend two classes paid for by AU: A pre-college writing course and either Cross Cultural Communications or a math course. The latter counts for credit.

Students are chosen for STEP by the Admissions Office based upon things like a test score or something in their essay that they see. While Smith does not know the algorithm Admissions uses, he says that students who are chosen are identified as having potential to “do amazing” at AU after going through STEP combined with their incoming skills and experiences.

According to statistics Smith provided, last year’s STEP program was 46 percent Black, 9 percent White, 2 percent Asian, 4 percent Native American and 39 percent Latinx.  According to Smith, there are usually “a number” of students who are first generation.

Students in the STEP class of 2016 often refer to AU as “the White sea.” And while STEP may be designed for students to become better acquainted to college life, for some including myself and Myrtil, they did not get that.

“I didn’t like that I didn’t know why I was part of STEP,” Myrtil said. “On one part there were people and students that did STEP in previous years and were talking to us like we should be ashamed that we are part of STEP. Even now when I talk to students they don’t know what STEP is.”

For Myrtil, STEP is an institutional failure on the part of the university because it does not create a true sense of campus culture. Myrtil also says that a lot of the very interactive group activities promoted by STEP literature was never seen through fruition and the program overall was not anything like it was advertized.

“So it just kind of like the mystery of why these 49 people were chosen,” Myril said. “Everyone was really smart. I felt like I was a really good student in high school that even if I didn’t do STEP, I could succeed or even learn from my mistakes and do better in college without a transitioning program, so I guess the [issue is] not knowing why I was the ‘chosen one’.”

But she did acknowledge that STEP helped her receive credit for her major and put her in contact with a professor who is mentoring her.

“[But] that’s really the only very impactful thing that STEP did,” Myrtil said.

Smith describes the program as “very successful” at helping students transition into college as measured by GPAs, retention rates and tracking the data across the board. They work with the students over their four years. He did not provide numbers of how many students followed up with the program, but says that several students continually meet with CDI.

At the end of the program, Smith says that the STEP students fill out evaluation forms where they answer questions about if they feel they are adequately prepared for the fall or how much they feel part of the community. Smith says that even though he is new to the program, he has resources like timelines, reports, schedules and templates and has met with people to revise and work on STEP.

“We are all constantly trying to make things better,” Smith said. “For me, I truly don’t have a reference [of being on the ground level] for how STEP went. Like for me, I’m looking at papers and different forms and things so I have an idea on paper how it went, [and] just what people are telling me. So for me, I’m definitely open to making changes and things like that. And even next year, when I’ve done STEP, I will still be open to how we can change it.”

Where do we go from here?

Some felt that AU lied and that their voices are not heard.

“I feel like the more influential kids, or kids of affluent people often like get treated better than people who aren’t as important, or whose parents aren’t as important in the world,” Hardrick said. “And that’s not right. If things go down and that kid is rich, then that kid is off the hook. It’s sad to say, but that’s the truth.”

We want to go to an institution that is actually diverse and inclusive. We want our voices to be heard and to live in a community that acknowledges us. There is a belief among students of color that campuses across the nation need to do better, accept students of color, and not just fill a quota but  actually enrich the campus community.

“It’s not something where you walk in and you step your foot on American University turf and instantly there’s all this diversity smacking you in the face. So I feel like if your gonna advertise diversity and inclusion please don’t do it so apparent, don’t do it so big,” Myrtil said. “That’s really the only thing that motivated me to come. Here I am at this academically amazing, very successful institution [where] I can get all this networking connections. I can be in the middle of D.C. that’s gonna help me with my major, and also it’s diverse, but that one aspect was kind of falsely advertised.”

This looks like hiring more professors and staff that look like us, instead of it just being “the help”. The AU cleaning crew is Latino, the food staff is black, but our teachers and administrators are white. We need to do better for our students, and on top of that, we should dismiss the rhetoric that students of color get an easy pass just because they are black Affirmative action may be there, but it has yet to make a dent.

“I do not feel included at AU, especially what I identify with is a black woman,” Myrtil said. “I feel like AU has this stigma where a lot of people look down and feel like they are better than us, not even just black people. … I feel like everyone has this view that they need to like outshine others because you know, they feel like they are smarter and have better connections and things. But at the end of the day, I got into the same institution you did.”

Ofonime Idiong is a first year student studying Communication, Legal Institutions, Economics and Government (CLEG).