Why students of colour don't want to return to school this next week

I don’t want to go back to school. 

Here’s the fact of the matter. 

No matter how early I have to get up (5:30am anyone?), no matter how cold it is outside, how many credits I’m taking or how small my room may be—I love to learn. I love interacting with people who love to learn. 

But for me, I don’t want to go back to school and that is making a statement. 

I don’t want to go back to school because I’m scared. 

I am scared for myself but most of all, I am scared for others. I am scared for the first year students of marginalized identity, I am scared for the transfer students who have yet to know the state and climate of our university. I am scared for my collegues. I am scared of losing my friends to this well-intentioned, but racist/sexist/heterosexist/clueless/PROBLEMATIC AS FUCK university. 

The cohort of students of colour and my friend group that I arrived with on this university are almost all gone. Transferred, or dropped out. The university’s goal is to raise our “diversity” to 20% by 2024 and let me tell you something. 1) That’s not going to happen. 2) If it DOES so miraciously happen, then the issues and incidents of harassment on campus will only get worse. The tension will get worse. Retention will get worse and honestly, I’m about ¾ ready to start a campaign to let people know that my university is NOT a good place to go for students of colour, or a white student who wants to learn how to be a decent human being in cultural competency. 

I don’t think my university understands how shitty it is to be a student on this campus. Administration can go home and sleep at night and wake up in the morning without even thinking about their skin colour. They get to leave it all at school to deal with the next day or hope that students graduate and get cycled out and forget about the shit that happens on campus. 

I deal with this fear every day I wake up. I have fucking anxiety over this shit. I have depression because I’ve been told that my worth has been put into my skin colour and nothing else. I know people who are borderline suicidal. 

So coming back to a university that claims that they’re ‘working on it’ is fucking scary. Coming back to a university that pretends everything is ‘okay’ is fucking scary. Because the most fucked up people in this world are the people who try to hide the fact that they are fucked up by painting a pretty face. 

That’s what my university is doing by brushing racist and homophobic events under the rug, by victim blaming female students who go running on our trails, by telling the public the university is not represented by these incidents BUT THEN GO ON AND TAKE CREDIT FOR STUDENTS WHO ORGANIZE FOR CHANGE ON CAMPUS.

Always asking students: “What do you want us to do?” as if we have the fucking answers. 

News flash: We are fucking students. We have fucking lives. We have homework and our PRIMARY FUCKING JOB IS TO BE A FUCKING STUDENT. It is YOUR FUCKING JOB to ensure that we aren’t fucking dying on this campus. YOU MAKE YOUR LIVING BECAUSE WE PAY YOU. If you have the fucking audacity to ask us what to do, then I fucking suggest you need to start paying us. 

There is no quick fix. I suggest that instead of using money to br[AND], you use it to make some actual change to label our campus as Anti-Racist. You’d really earn some fucking money then. Even then, this would take probably 4 years at least to do. I understand. I know that students of colour aren’t a priority on this campus. 

So I want to know what is on the top of your list right now. What are you having meetings about? With whom? Where is my money being spent? Because god fucking forbid it be spent on some new paint on a wall when blood is shed faster than that.

 I’m scared to go back to school. 

I fear that this may be the semester I lose my fucking mind. The semester where my grades drop so low because I’m so busy trying to do the administration’s job. The semester that kills me. The semester that kills my friends, my brothers and sisters and colleagues in arms. 

Just remember: We don’t forget the ways in which we have been marginalized and tokenized and dehumanized and ignored. And we definitely don’t forget the people of the institution who made that possible.