parents and their tireless commitment to their eccentric Auntie Mame son—I was unsure what I was supposed to…do. I was ostensibly part of a class, a school, a culture, a race, a city, but determining what that meant or where the entry point was proved to be a challenge. I realized I had never thought about what college was for. College was just the thing you did at the beginning of the montage, and at the end of the montage you’re Toni Morrison. That was my whole plan: be Toni Morrison. Why didn’t I just go to Princeton, where she taught at the time? Because it seemed super white, if you want the truth. And I didn’t want to starve to death.
Columbia offered a regular meal plan that didn’t require having any aptitude for social interactions, so I went there.
* * *
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During my first week of school I received an email about the first meeting of the Black Student Union. I stared at the screen, once again not comprehending. Was this for me specifically? What did they want from me? How did they know I was black? Was I being catfished? And for what purpose? Is this how they got my ancestors on the ships—invitations to club meetings sent by email? Plausible. I told myself that I wouldn’t be joining the Black Student Union at Columbia because I never wanted to participate in any activity ever. Honestly, I was just nervous that there was going to be a quiz. Even though I’d been president of the Black Awareness Club in high school, there were few black students in my year and one of my science classes included whale-watching in Provincetown, so it wasn’t exactly Wakanda. The Columbia BSU felt markedly different from the Black Awareness Club, like I was stepping into the major leagues after hanging out on the farm team for years. There’d only been maybe ten of us in the club, a quarter of them white. The BSU filled a classroom and included undergrads and grad students. There was something about it that communicated Official Blackness to me.
When I got the email about the first BSU meeting at Columbia, I leaned out of my dorm window to look at the space in the basement of Hamilton Hall where it would be held, as if the opaque windows of the building would reveal how African American this experience was going to be. “Bring your kufi, we going in!” I ended up walking by it a day later when the meeting was about to start, searching the faces of the people walking in for a hint of acceptance or judgment or betrayal. They didn’t seem to notice me.
And so I went about my year, avoiding the BSU and instead making a group of friends so diverse we could have starred in an early-2000s Disney Channel show. Looking back, particularly at the group of students that comprised my first-year suite, it’s almost a parody of Benetton-ad realness. We spanned races, cultural backgrounds, nationalities, abilities, and sexual orientations. A blind Persian boy with a love for N.W.A. lived next door to an out gay boy from Staten Island with a Nick Carter haircut and a stereo that constantly played club music; across the common room was a willowy French Canadian girl who seemed bemused by all of our interactions and in my memories is always in pajamas; catty-corner to her, a goth girl with a huge comics collection and a devotion to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We were all, to some extent, friends by nature of proximity, and they formed the basis for the friendships I sought out as the year progressed. And in those groupings, I was nominally black but not, you know, officially African American. Or so I thought.
However, the facts were these: I had a merit-based scholarship that was earmarked for students of color; I was, mysteriously, on the BSU mailing list; and, at some point in the application process, I had self-identified as Vanessa Huxtable and some admissions officer had puzzled over that for a hot minute and then finally marked my race down in a file somewhere. And while I thought that my race was incidental information in my friend groups and in my place at the school, as time went on it kept popping up in odd but consequential ways.
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I feel like I should give you a little context right now: When I started at Columbia, the president of the