My Story
In August 2015, I became a part of the black community by virtue of my best friends – three black women at Harvard (Audrey, Mwabe, and Arin (pictured below!) whom I met through Dorm Crew and knew beforehand) who had their own networks within and outside of the black community.
I joined the Black Community (official organizations run by the Black Community Leaders umbrella) through my membership with the Harvard Society for Black Scientists and Engineers (HSBSE) and the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College. I was on the board of HSBSE and involved in Kuumba during my freshman and sophomore years. My involvement (in these organizations and black Harvard social life more generally) decreased drastically my junior fall when I started recruiting for consulting and is now picking back up since it my senior spring.
However, I still believe my interpersonal connections were and (still are) very, very strong.
My personal experience in Harvard’s black community has, honestly, been amazing. I’ve come to find that my extroverted personality (and busy-bee-ness) has uniquely allowed me to call all three spaces “home”:
- The unofficial black Harvard community (the sum of all black students at Harvard);
- The Black Community Leaders (BCL – the umbrella organization that includes all official black Harvard organizations like Kuumba and the Association for Black Harvard Women; I will use BCL to refer to the officially organized black organizations);
- The greater Harvard College community, especially through Adams House and the Franklin Fellowship
If one of them were to disappear, I can confidently say that I would still have a fulfilling social life at Harvard. However, I have plenty of black classmates with social networks that are not as well connected. This disconnectedness manifests itself in various ways. For some students, this means that their closest friend circles are only made up of other black students. For others, it means that they do not identify with the black community at all. There are also students who are very involved in their BCL organization but rarely spend time with the students who exist at the fringes of the black community and are not involved in these organizations at all. While I don’t believe every black student must be a member of a black organization nor has to be strongly embedded in Harvard’s black community, I do hope for a healthy social environment for all black students at Harvard.
Interviews with Classmates
To better understand how black students were already associating with the black Harvard community and to reflect on my own experience, I asked four classmates the following questions: (1) “Does Harvard have a black community? And, if so, do you feel a part of it?” (2) “Do you think having a strong black community is important at a place like Harvard or not?” (3) “Since freshman year, how often have you reflected on your experience as a student here?” (4) What would you think of a fellowship that served as a reflection space for black Harvard students?
As I’d hoped, my friends gave me a pretty wide range of answers, ideas, and personal experiences. I learned that some of my classmates don’t feel a part of the black community and don’t see a strong black community as an important thing to have. My friend Alexis*[1], an academic junior and social senior in Quincy House, said that she only felt a part of the black community “50% of the time” and shared “the black community can be cliqueish – both with each other and outside of itself… some people have their extracurricular friends and their black friends and those groups don’t overlap”. Alexis also said that she didn’t think a black community was completely necessary. “One upon a time I did,” she shared, “but I think the world is changing… class reigns first”. And when I shared with her my idea to make a reflection fellowship for black students, she told me, “I’d be interested, but I don’t know if it realistically would become a thing… because you’d get an overrepresentation of people who already exist in these spaces”. While I didn’t agree with everything Alexis said, I think her opinion was an accurate representation of the feelings of some black Harvard students who have felt excluded from official black Harvard organizations.
My friend Ibrahim, a sophomore in Adams House, was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum of black community involvement. He became a part of the Black Men’s Forum as soon as he landed on campus and has held leadership positions since then. His freshman year, most of his friends were black students because once he “realized he could get everything he needed within the black community”, he thought “what’s the point of going outside of it?”. He shared, “I thought it was one or the other for some reason? I wasn’t going to seek white friends unless it came naturally”. But after he went through punch and joined a final club his sophomore fall, this tendency changed and “helped [him] to become a more social individual with white students”. Now he says that he uses the black community as a jumping off point and can “be involved in the black community but still be a part of the greater, diverse, community”.
The other two people I interviewed - Harriet, a senior in Eliot House, and John, a senior + mixed-race student in Adams House – held sentiments between Harriet and Ibrahim’s. The both considered themselves part of the “traditional black community” but recognized that they had a lot of non-black communities that they felt a part of. They also shared ideas about the fellowship that I hadn’t yet considered: Harriet thought my project could help “harness the political power” of black Harvard students to drive institutional change. I’m not too sure if I want this fellowship to focus on driving institutional change – but I think it could be a great byproduct. John told me that I’d want to make sure it was something “fun” and not too heavy or people wouldn’t be excited to get involved because they’re already a part of black Harvard discussion spaces that discuss heavy topics.
