Being the only dark person in the room has never been odd to me. I spent 12 years of my education in a private white baptist school. I was ostracized many times for many reasons, whether it be my skin or hair, and not to mention I was the biggest girl in my class. I tried assimilating, and when that didn't work I tried rebelling. Nothing. Nothing fixed the loneliness, nothing fixed the under-representation that was taking place. Not to mention my high school just didn't care.
Granted, as years went on it got better. We got more black students, mostly for athletic purposes. By senior year we had the most black students ever in my school's history. Now that might not sound like much to most people but to us, we took pride in being that class with the black folk. The only class with a black homecoming queen and prom queen (which was me by the way lol). By graduation, I got used to having a decent number of people like me in my class. Then I came here and felt like I was back at square one.
No, I was not forced to go here and yes JMU was my first choice. No, I do not regret it. However, I do still feel that same loneliness of being I am back to being the only black face in a room. I am back to the feeling of being under-represented. Now, this wouldn't be a problem if the university did not make it seem like this was not a problem.
As a university, James Madison loves to put on a face of being the pinnacle of diversity. JMU is not as diverse as JMU thinks it is. Just because you put the word "diverse" on something does not magically make it diverse. JMU has one of the lowest percentages of African American students in the state of Virginia, even lower than UVA. This is sad because UVA is always criticized for not having enough African American students but here we are around the corner with almost 10% less than UVA. We give tours of the universities highlighted place but don't include a tour to see the "diverse" aspects of campus. We have a whole freshman orientation week that from my recollection does not include any aspect of minority input.
When I came here my freshman year I had no clue where to find anyone like me. I went a whole year without really knowing where to find people like me. That doesn't make sense for a school to be 'so' diverse. Granted we may not be the worse when it comes to the treatment of minority students but there also is not enough attention to supporting the minority community. We put more emphases and funding in sports than we do into our minority students.
It is not enough just to have a center for the "multicultural" folks to go. Instead of just highlighting sports, highlight some of the amazing things that the rest of us are doing. It is not enough to have a minority outreach. Have something to make people of other cultures want to come here. The one thing I hate to hear from people back home is, "I never saw any black folk on campus so I went somewhere else."
THAT IS A PROBLEM!
It's a problem that I know all too well considering when my mother and I visited we ditched the tour to go find where the black folk was. You wouldn't think this would be a problem when there is a picture of a black person on every other picture on the website.
The university should support it's minority community then put diverse on everything. Support prospective students weekend by providing aid to get minority students here. Put some funding in programs to help the multicultural community. Then slap the word diversity onto everything. Put the effort to stand by the multicultural students and help get more black students here. Because unlike most people believe, we have a great African American community but often times no one can find us.
Lately, the new vice president, Tim Miller, has made efforts to address this by reaching out to influential organizations in our community and attending our events. This means a lot, at least it does to me. It would be great if our president would make some of the efforts that he has, or at the very least publicize our events for prospective students other than prospective students
