Diversity and Inclusion: My VT experience
If you’d asked me in 2015 how I felt about diversity and inclusion policies, I’d probably have rolled my eyes and called them BS. At that time in my life, I’d just graduated my with my BS in biology from Lincoln University, a small HBCU in Pennsylvania. Most of the faculty and all of my friends were black. A majority of the student population was black, and when I traveled home for holidays, I went back to a sea of black faces. I never felt left out or excluded because I wasn’t. I was part of the majority. Within the next few years, that all changed. When I first set foot on Virginia Tech’s campus in August 2017, I immediately felt that things were different. I’d never seen so many white people in one area before. I sat in my first few classes and felt like an oddball for the first tie in my life. Seeing my colleagues’ performance in class, I started to feel like I was behind the curve, like I didn’t know as much as them. As the months flew by, these feelings started to intensify; I started feeling like I didn’t belong here. Even at social events, I just felt like I stood out, my interests and conversations weren’t that of the white majority and people didn’t really get what I was saying. In my head, the white students had knowledge far superior to mine and I didn’t stand a chance at competing. In the few years between undergrad and grad school, my academic world view had been completely flipped. How could I hope to be successful in a place where people like me clearly aren’t?
This is exactly the reason why diversity and inclusion policies should absolutely be enforced in the classroom. I was blessed enough to attend an HBCU where my blackness was not only acknowledged, but nurtured. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. I entered an environment where my culture is not fully understood and the lack of a large black population caused me to feel alone. This caused my academic performance to slip, my confidence to plummet, and warranted a few visits to Cook Counseling Center. VT faculty do try their best to create an inclusive and diverse environment, but ultimately they fall short (at least in my field). The policies are often talked about and they’re written in the syllabi, but in day-to-day activities, I hardly feel included in the conversation. When I bring up race, I get a fearful look from faculty and a scripted response of something along the lines of “you are a valued member of the community”. Cute, but it doesn’t help me sleep at night. We’ve come a long way in terms of diversity/inclusion, don’t get me wrong, but it’s time to focus less on the policies and terminology and put it into practice. Let’s live that truth, so that we can have the diverse faculty and staff we desire on paper, so that we can have more diverse graduates who don’t have to drop out due to depression and anxiety. Let’s not talk about it, let’s be about it.
