Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,31
bushes across the walkway from the entrance. I’d observe the people going in with all the attention and all the nuance of Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor from Bewitched. Then, after the meeting began, I’d walk slowly by the door, staring at it as if it would give up an elemental secret from sheer force of my passive-aggressive will. Then I would go back to my dorm, read Maurice, and listen to Ani DiFranco.
It was an interesting experiment in reconciling my outward assumptions about people and their inner truths. That man has a yarmulke, I’d marvel, while devouring my Kit Kat bar, and yet he is gay. The solution to all of my problems was to go inside. The issue with my solution was that all my problems were inside. And so I remained, shrouded in leaves, feet in the dirt.
* * *
—
It wasn’t until I received an email from the Black Student Union at the beginning of my sophomore year that I was prompted to move my feet. As you’ll recall, I’d received a surprising email from the BSU at the start of my freshman year. This was a second email. These people were relentless. While the email I’d received my first year had been a simple invitation that I viewed with great suspicion, this second email was completely different. “Congratulations,” the missive from the faceless collective read, “you’re a Black Student Union student mentor this year!”
Honestly, who were the black people running this club? Show yourselves! I looked at the email like “Harpo, who dis woman?” They wanted me to mentor a first-year student. No, not just wanted. Demanded. I read it. I reread it. I closed the browser. I walked downstairs—still in the same building as my first year—and stared at the walls of Hamilton Hall and the little basement room where, I presumed, the Black Student Union spent every meeting figuring out ways to torment me with allegations that I was, in some way, one of them.
“You’ve been assigned as a mentor for first-year student Quentin Brick!” the email read.*1 The audacity of the exclamation point made me lose my breath. “Reach out to your mentee as soon as possible, make sure to show them the ropes, give them insight into what your experience has been like as a black student at Columbia; share any wisdom and good guidance you’ve gleaned from your first year.” On every point of the assignment I felt wholly unqualified. I did not know of what ropes they spoke. (Perhaps in the gym? Unclear.) In my first year, I had very intentionally not joined the Black Student Union, no offense; I’d joined a couple of writing-related clubs, made friends in my dorm, gone to class most of the time, read a lot, and downloaded a lot of Ani on Napster. Nothing about this struck me as particularly black, let alone significant enough to pass down to someone else. What did the email see in me?
* * *
—
The empty Black Student Union meeting room offering no answers, I decided I had no other choice but to find this Quentin person. What I would do after I found him was still a question mark. Maybe a fist bump? Possibly.
At the time, it was super easy to stalk people at Columbia because online privacy policies were basically a shrug emoji, so I was able to look Quentin up, find his phone number, his student mailbox number, and his room number. He was in the same building as I was, situated between my room and the Black Student Union offices. I wouldn’t even have to put on shoes for this farce. I looked him up in the actual face book, a printed book they would put out for every class that just had people’s faces in it. It was really ingenious. He stared back at me—black of course; skin tone a bit darker than mine, perhaps; a shy grin; short hair like mine. A mirror, of sorts. And a mystery.
I felt bad that he’d been stuck with me, honestly. I wished someone had conscripted some other random black person to mentor me a year earlier. Actually! Why hadn’t they dragged some black dude, kicking and screaming, to my door to offer me words of wisdom, and give me copies of his notes on The Iliad, and buy me fashionable sweaters, and stay up all night, braiding my hair as we parsed the construct of race? (This is mentorship, right?)