Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,28
university was a guy named George Rupp. This was in 1999. I never met George Rupp and I actually had to look this information up because I am not a podcaster named Alex and, apparently, I didn’t pay enough attention to important things like knowing the name of the president when I was in college. Ah, well. You can’t learn everything. That’s going to be the motto of my college when I start one: Thomas University—you can’t learn everything!
Anyway, George Rupp announced his retirement in March of 2001 and was succeeded, in 2002, by Lee Bollinger, who’d previously been the president of the University of Michigan. Neither of these men had too direct an impact on my life—in fact, by the time Lee Bollinger officially began his tenure I was already at a different school. However, the important thing about Lee Bollinger here is not so much what he did at Columbia but what he did before. In 1997, a student named Barbara Grutter sued the University of Michigan Law School, and then-university-president Lee Bollinger, because Grutter had been denied admission in 1996. She surmised that her earned spot had been taken by a less qualified student who was admitted through affirmative action. The case that she brought contended that the affirmative action policy was unconstitutional, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court eventually ruled in the school’s favor but, obviously, as you are reading this in a less affirmative, more inactive future, the policy would remain contentious and would continue to be chipped away at for years.
So, when I first arrived at Columbia, Grutter v. Bollinger had just started making its way through the lower court system and affirmative action was all anybody seemed to want to talk about. It was a hot-button topic on the news, it was widely discussed on campus, and it was a question that hung, in my experience, over every admission. Once I was walking through campus with a friend and he asked me what I got on my SATs, which is the sort of question that is only not insanely random for a few years of your life. It’s odd, this period during which the prevailing assessment of your academic potential (and worth as a candidate for a successful future) is contained in a number that seems to be everyone’s business. It’s like there was a Freedom of Information Act request filed by all the people at your church, your parents’ jobs, your school, and any random truck stop.
Anyway, even though this was late in my first year and I had begun to suspect that my worth wasn’t bound up in those four digits, I wasn’t totally sure about that, so I told him. Offhandedly, he said, “Oh, you must be affirmative action.” And then he kept talking about the paper we had to write on Song of Solomon.
Sometimes I think about the nonchalance of his assessment and that stings me; sometimes I think about the haze of confusion that settled around me as we continued to walk through the sunny springtime campus and that brings me low. Sometimes what sticks is just being asked the question at all and having a simple fact be a trap that I could so guilelessly walk into. A trap that hadn’t been set by an individual but rather by a circumstance.
These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.
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All my life I’d operated under the assumption that there were many kinds of blackness. I saw the variety of experiences on campus, in the church congregation at home, at family reunions. And I assumed that eventually I’d learn how to navigate them, to feel comfortable in spaces where I felt not black enough or the wrong kind of black. Or, if I didn’t learn to navigate them, I thought, perhaps this wider exposure at Columbia could offer me a path to change. I could be a different kind of black. But in that passing moment, during the conversation about the SATs, it occurred to me that no matter where I was, perhaps there was only one kind of black.
From then on, everything about Columbia had an asterisk for me. Everyone, from the faceless admissions officers to the Black Student