Baylor University is where I learned to be Black. In 2012, I found myself in the six percent of Black students in a sea of more than 15,000. Having avoided a reckoning with my own skin prior to setting foot on campus as a freshman, I was almost immediately blindsided by my own identity.
Blackness is not a monolith. Although there were 900 Black students at the university my freshman year, there were many manifestations of Blackness within that number. Black American students who carried the legacy of slavery. African American students attending college with the support of their immigrant parents. Afro-Latinx students whose identities had so often been left out of societal explorations of Blackness. International students who’d traveled from other countries and brought their own Black legacies. Bi-racial students, like myself, who were struggling to reconcile other cultural identities with the Black experience.
I grew up in Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the U.S. Despite this fact, my childhood was one in which I perpetually ran from my skin. I’d been in all kinds of spaces, including predominantly white ones, for most of my life. In fact, the student population at Baylor wasn’t much different from the small high school I’d just left. There, I’d made friends with ease, and while I experienced moments of otherness as one of a few Black students at the school, these were usually perpetuated by teachers, not classmates.
But it wasn’t until college that I realized something: I fit in because I made myself fit in. Short of shedding my skin, I put off everything that might place me outside the gates of whiteness. I listened almost exclusively to rock. I shopped at Hot Topic. I used words like “rad.” Behaviors like these became my norm because I subconsciously knew my place in the social hierarchy of a white, conservative Christian high school was fragile. College quickly proved to be much of the same.
The racism at Baylor is usually subtle. It’s receiving fewer offers to join the university’s most popular sororities than your white friends. It’s being told by an academic advisor to switch your major, with the implication it’s because you’re a Black woman and therefore not cut out for medical school. It’s seeing Black and brown Wacoans portrayed as destitute, desperate people who Baylor students can rescue through poverty simulations and prayer. It’s going to a local park and hearing your white friend hope out loud that the nearby Black children have a father because a man hadn’t accompanied their mother on the outing. It’s sitting through a class discussion about affirmative action in which it’s suggested students of color aren’t smart enough to get into the university on merit alone (never mind the fact affirmative action has historically benefitted white women).
Although my Baylor experience was overwhelmingly positive, it was at times isolating and painful. I was always aware that the white mainstream rarely intended to make space for me. Early on, I had to make a decision between finally embodying the totality of who I am or subduing my existence for social acceptance.
I chose to be Black. Baylor was the first place I made an all-Black group of friends. I learned how to verbalize the otherness I’d always felt because I finally had friends who’d felt it, too. I became aware of women, in real life and online, who embodied the strength and dignity of people sharing my race and gender. I started listening to rap and hip hop (and it was leagues better than the music I’d been listening to). Perhaps most importantly, I finally learned how to do my hair, a task that had long perplexed me and my Mexican mother as my hair texture changed with age.
Baylor is where I learned to advocate for myself and people like me. Part of this learning came from exploration of my own identity as a bi-racial woman who looks like a fully Black person. But an even bigger part was due to steadily increasing public outrage about police brutality against Black Americans.
The class of 2016 witnessed the high-profile deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Grey, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile. While these murders are tragic on their own, there’s a secondary tragedy that happens with each of these: individuals who look and live like the deceased experience a second-hand terror of remembering that they, too, could meet a similar fate under any number of circumstances.
Attending Baylor was always difficult, but especially so from 2014 until my graduation in 2016, the times during which these murders took place. There was more than enough callousness to go around, and not much effort put into trying to understand the cultural mechanisms that cause certain kinds of people to be disproportionately killed by police.
But within this oppression, Black Baylor shined. We gathered for campus protests and die-ins to tell our community we wouldn’t be quiet on matters of life and death. We spoke at chapel about our experiences with racism at Baylor, even though we knew it’d incur vitriol. We wrote petitions to campus leadership demanding greater representation for students of color on campus.
Despite our grief, we rejoiced in the collective pride of being Black in a society often leaves us feeling broken.
Throughout my cultural revolution, I still had predominantly white friend groups through church. I was a regular part of encounters debating the relationship between systemic racism and Christian duty.
All of this was punctuated by a defining church experience that triggered my four-year hiatus from institutional Christianity. I sat through a sermon where a white pastor told me, a Black woman, that my racial identity and my spiritual identity were not compatible. Although I’d already decided I was done with my church by the sermon’s end, finding out that the pastor apologized to a group of Black people in private and not from the same Sunday-morning pulpit from which he’d given the message only sealed the deal.
Although this church was not directly affiliated with Baylor, various students and staff attended, and several of them held the same views as the pastor. Additionally, I found out a number of Black Baylor students attending other churches had equally and exceedingly horrifying experiences within their own predominantly white churches.
Although I grieved the loss of my church home for quite a while, I cannot overstate the importance of my leaving. I still love Jesus because I left. Now, I’m blessed to be part of a beautiful church family called Mosaic Waco that was humbly built with multicultural values at its core. Not a Sunday goes by that our white pastor doesn’t champion the compatibility of racial identities and faith identities. What a rare and beautiful thing to see the church as Jesus intended.
Finally, Baylor is where I learned to rejoice in my skin.
There’s a temptation to reduce Blackness down to a legacy of suffering:Although that’s an undeniable part of our heritage, it’s far from the full story.
I spent many Friday and Saturday evenings at Black social events where skin was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Good music, good food, and good company meant we were free to put off the drudgery of moving through spaces in which we didn’t quite fit, if only for a few hours. Black fraternities and sororities punctuate each school year with unmissable events like Battle on the Burning Sands, an annual step show organized by the Baylor Alphas that brought together Black students from universities across the state. Various Black academic and social organizations dedicate dozens of hours each semester to improving the academic and social experience of students of color, promoting cultural pride and organizing community service efforts in Waco.
Even in non-Black circles, I made room for my identity. I found precious, empathetic friends and mentors who made all the pain of life at a historically white institution worthwhile. I found a home within Baylor’s journalism department, where I connected with some of the most accepting faculty, staff and students on campus. There I met other weird journalism kids who spent their free time learning and debating about racial justice and the impact of our nation’s complicated (and often harmful) racial past and present. I learned how to articulate my race-based grief and found white allies who embraced my Blackness.
All the joy I’d developed during my time at Baylor peaked at the Kente Ceremony during my last year of school. This annual ceremony takes place a month before graduation and celebrates the academic achievements of upcoming graduates, especially Black students. Participants receive a Kente cloth, a sash worn with graduation regalia featuring vibrant green, yellow, and red threads stitched in patterns that celebrate the academic success of the wearer and allude to the ancient Ghanaian practice from which the cloths originate.
In spring 2016, I found myself sitting in a small chapel in alphabetical order with dozens of other students. As we waited for the Kente Ceremony to begin, I was amazed to see how many Black people I knew in the pews around me. Sure, my closest friends were there, but I also recognized others who had maintained various levels of visibility during my college experience. They were leaders who’d hosted the events I loved to be part of, brilliant students who’d made notable academic achievements, activists who stood fearlessly when all we wanted to do was give up.
These were the very people who taught me to love myself, and I doubted most of them knew.
The program announcer began to call names, and I clapped for every person who walked across the stage to receive their cloth, whether I knew them or not. We all did. It was a celebration of the common joy and grief we’d endured at our university until that moment, and an audible affirmation that it was a job well done.
As my turn came, I grew nervous. I don’t enjoy being the center of attention, and this was the epitome of it. The announcer called the name ahead of mine, and I pleaded with my anxieties. Finally, she said it: “Rae Jefferson.” I shuffled forward and awkwardly let the staff member place the cloth around my shoulders. The chapel filled with cheers and I looked into the crowd. Many of those people I barely knew were clapping and smiling for me, and I knew they felt the same things I did.
In that moment, I was suddenly, deeply, undeniably grateful for the pleasure it is to be Black.
