ITOLM Part V

Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted about being white and for good reason. If you are familiar with Prairie View, you know that over the past two years a massive rebuilding and restructuring of everything PVAMU has taken center stage. Brand New Sciences, Architecture, Engineering and Criminal Justice buildings now stand in place of their worn down brothers. And with these new colleges, comes a new audience. As SyNONYM readers know, I spent my first semesters being one of around 150 Caucasian students out of nearly 8,000 total students. But as the old saying goes Times are changing, this past semester Prairie View has seen an exponential increase in Caucasians on campus. While the increase in numbers has so far been limited to the freshman population, its effects are unmistakable.

Being raised in the most unbiased of places I was raised not to care if you’re black white brown Purple or Cumquat (as dad would say). Sure I had left the state of WI on many occasions New York, Illinois, plus many more, I thought I had a pretty god grasp on what the world was like. But I was clearly mistaken it took a little place called PV for me to realize that.

In Wisconsin people don’t care what color you are, I mean sure there are a few, but the vast majority of people honestly don’t give a rats. But here in the south things are a little different. Still today a definite line separates the white from the black.

Imagine an office, 90 percent of its employee’s black, and due to a corporate takeover those black employees are being forced to give their jobs over to whites. (Or vise versa if you like). Naturally a state of tension will arise. Now picture a campus that has historically been 95% black since 1876, give way to a seemingly large white population. Once again tension arises. This is the state of whites and blacks at PV today. Now don’t get me wrong, most of the students could care less if you look like a cumquat or not, but still there are those who do.

Days are more often then not just days, but once and a while you run into a group of those who (in their right) believe you really don’t belong. For me (after two years of blackening up) it’s pretty easy to ice skate around the issue, a “hit me one” handshake and a few cleverly placed words and I am just a black as they are. But I see in many of the new white fish freshman the inability to take a stand in such situations, this is what I see being common to PV for the next five years. Until the current freshman get some black in them, and become upper classmen.

I end this post with this

“The white students here at Prairie View are doing the exact opposite as those black, thirty years ago”. And in the end it will be better for us all.