In my experience, on-campus housing at a community college is hell for most who observe alternative lifestyles. The status quo from high school days trails behind the newly recognized sports-"men" like an obnoxiously empowering and ominous, dark shadow; the same cultural appropriation beheld and illegally adopted by the white masses in the youth of the Adirondacks is still kept close like a cross-emblazoned locket to the Caucasian Christian heart with words engraved like "my music." In fact, the music is not yours. The music belongs to me.

The helplessness of white faculty to enforce civility in their white and black students at SUNY Adirondack was disgusting and pitiful. The level of disrespect afflicted upon me personally was unprecedented and completely uncalled for. Through fear of difference, people were inspired to assume I would practice evil magic, place curses upon them and their friends, and were so moved by this fear as to impose nonverbal threats with their body language alone, steal from me, and spread a rumor school-wide that I was a practitioner of Vodou, when, in fact, I had no knowledge of the religion whatsoever until the end of the semester, as I had studied its methods, practices, and doctrine in an Anthropology course on Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion.

Such allegations of black magic were initiated by my confession of a curse I had imagined to inflict upon a boy in one of my middle school classes. I also told the same group of people how I charmed someone else in a high school class of mine with a magic bracelet imbued with sexual intention. Regardless, the imagination of these people inspired a community-wide aversion to myself, and was an inspiration within the mass-mind to hate and exclude a person they did not understand.

After the year 1480 in Europe, the region was in the throes of a magical and heretical inquisition, the likes of which left hundreds of thousands of people dead by torture and/or strangulation, among other methods of lawful murder. The only reason to credence these people had to commit these atrocities was that someone had called them a witch, or accused them of some heretical act or lifestyle. It pains and embarrasses me that even today this issue still stands, and people continue to impose their religious intolerance unto those whose spiritual inclinations they are unbound and unwilling to understand, and who do not identify with their European Catholic tradition.

Indeed, Haiti, arguably being the most magically reformed state in the Western world, had relied upon a religious syncretism, a mixture of Catholicism and ancient African traditions, which they dubbed Vodou, to free the slaves, and bring hope, peace, and light to the lives of the oppressed. The commonality of western thought is largely based on stereotypes surrounding this religion, and harsh allegations of its supposed association with Satanism and evil. In fact, the religion was started as an enforcer of black unity, an inspiration to life, and an eventual equalizer for the races, as it would be the bane of white supremacy.

So for myself to be accused and hated for Vodou seemed a confusing and illegitimate cause for persecution. I would carry on, however, to lead my club and obtain the highest grade I could accomplish. I would not allow the rumors of some plain white Christian fool and his friends to disrupt my spiritual peace, and neither should anyone else.