Withdrawing from CUNY Hunter College amidst unredressed anti-Black racism: A Quest for Self-Esteem, Black Identity, and Self-Preservation

#REPARATIONS

Withdrawing from CUNY Hunter College

One quiet March evening, as I wound down from a stressful week, collecting my self, I sat criss-crossed on the floor as Bob Marley played softly, yet powerfully in the atmosphere of my bedroom.

Up to that moment, I was attending City University of New York, Hunter College receiving my education. A professor at Hunter College recently made national news for making vile comments about Black people, not to my surprise.

I am no stranger to anti-Blackness, the pervasive hostility and suppression of Black peoples, that penetrates nearly all post-colonial institutions around the world.

As Bob Marley and the Wailer’s music saturated my spirit, I could no longer hear his voice, but the voice of Professor Friedman, snarking that “if you train a Black person well enough, they know to use the back entrance” and that Black children were “too dumb to know they are in a bad school“.

Well, I decided, in that moment, that she was correct! Black people are often conditioned to inhabit a position and attitude of subservience, at the cost of their self-esteem and their integrity as a community. Our fear of the cost of rebellion, due to a history of white-on-Black violence, has, truthfully, cost us in strength, resilience, and integrity.

After the incident, I remember feeling a sense of confirmation, that the subtle yet tangible discrimination I face as a Black American university student had come to the surface– there was evidence of the anti-Black hostility I had grown to tolerate.

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Institutional Racism, Double Consciousness, and Globalized Anti-Blackness

My experience with anti-Black racism is an experience that can be broadly defined as institutional racism— a systematized racism set in place by both quantitative and qualitative structures; hard and soft white supremacy; racism by the books and casual, everyday racism.

This kind of structure can cause a break in the psyche of the Black person, what WEB Dubois has famously described as double consciousness– a two-fold identity, as both African and Western, free from the chains of enslavement, but oppressed by its legacy, maintaining a permanent sense of rejection and inferiority while also being the force of motion in the Western system.

Black African slaves set the groundwork for the globalized society we currently inhabit, with nearly 400 years of unpaid, violent, and brutal labor. As the issue of globalized anti-Blackness persists, I see it as essential for Western powers to redress and compensate for this centuries-long injustice.