Posted on 07/21/2013 7:03:16 AM PDT by T-Bird45
NORMAN — When George Lee first came to the University of Oklahoma in 2009, he felt out of place.
Lee, who is black, grew up in a low-income, predominantly black neighborhood in Bryan, Texas, near College Station. But when he arrived at OU, he said, he felt pressure to change how he spoke and acted to integrate himself into the dominant culture.
He felt like he couldn't be the same person he'd been in his old neighborhood, he said. He felt like he was being asked to trade part of his “blackness” for the values and characteristics of the dominant white culture on campus.
“There had to be some type of a trade-off,” Lee said.
The idea of double consciousness — when a person's identity is divided between two cultures — isn't new. Sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois explored the idea in his 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk.” But a new study suggests the conflict remains for many black college students today.
According to records from the National Center for Education Statistics, 64 percent of OU's undergraduates in the fall 2011 semester were white. Just 5 percent of undergraduates in 2011 were black.
At Oklahoma State University, 73 percent of undergraduates in 2011 were white, while only 5 percent were black.
According to a recent study published in the National Communication Association's journal, Communication Education, black students at predominantly white universities still often struggle to assimilate themselves into a culture they see as different from their own.
The study consisted of six focus groups spread out over three universities — a major Midwestern university in a small, rural community; a major Midwestern private university in a larger city; and a major Southwestern public university in a small metropolitan area. At each of the three schools, black students made up 8 percent or less of the overall student population.
According to the study, many of the students reported feeling an internal tension between remaining proud of their own culture and altering their own language or culture to adapt to the perceived “whiteness” of their universities.
That inner conflict continues when those students return home, according to the report. Of the 67 students involved in the focus groups, 52 were first-generation college students. Those students reported their families didn't have an understanding of the students' college experiences and the desire for a college degree.
One student reported feeling out of place during a summer family reunion, according to the report.
“I want to make it, have a job ... and they keep asking why I'm not married,” the student said. “I don't even bother explaining the idea that I am preparing myself for law school.”
Lee, an African American Studies major at OU, said he notices that difference when he returns to Texas and talks to family and neighbors in the neighborhood where he grew up. Family and friends treat him with greater privilege, he said. He's also more aware of the poverty and drug use in the neighborhood than he was while he was growing up, he said.
One of the study's authors said colleges and universities need to do a better job of engaging black college students and their communities.
Jake Simmons, a professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, said schools could help alleviate that tension by implementing programs that reach out not only to students, but also to their families and home communities to let them know what's happening on campus.
Simmons said universities could also develop multicultural programs that do a better job of representing the entirety of students' home cultures, rather than simply holding a stereotypical celebration for major holidays.
Spencer Davis, an OU student from Tulsa, said he's felt the conflict between his own heritage and the surrounding culture since before he came to OU. Davis, who is black, attended Jenks High School, which is predominantly white.
Davis, 19, is a second-generation college student — his father graduated from OU and his mother has a degree from the University of Tulsa.
When Davis was in high school, it was obvious that he was in the minority, he said. He felt the internal conflict between his heritage and his surroundings then, he said, but he adopted the speech patterns and culture of the people around him.
After a while, Davis realized he wasn't totally comfortable speaking with other black people, he said. When he came to OU, his social network broadened to include friends from several races. But he still feels like he belongs to multiple groups, leaving him to figure out where he fits.
“It hasn't really impeded me,” he said. “I've definitely managed to navigate it now.”
I am white. I grew up in the South. I went away to college in the North. I felt pressure to change how I spoke and acted to integrate myself into the dominant culture.
A college friend of mine was east Asian. He felt pressure to change how he spoke and acted to integrate himself into the dominant culture, including attending a Christian church because he was in ROTC, and who later did two tours in Vietnam because he was grateful to this nation for accepting Asian refugees from communism.
Isn't that the truth. When a friend of mine said she'd be afraid to visit my hometown (small farming community in OH) because they'd lynch her...I just looked at her and said “you aren't that special.”
She was confused...I had to clarify, people would look at you twice because you are a stranger and want to know who you are and who you are with (it's called small town living), but if you think they'd give up their lives, their families, or their livelihoods because of the color of your skin...well you just aren't that special.
Skin color isn’t the issue, culture is.
You subscribe to an inferior culture that believes working hard is a ‘white thing’, or that dressing like a criminal is perfectly ok, then yes, most people, black or white, will be suspicious of you.
What alot of horsesh*t.
Change is uncomfortable for everyone.
The writer must feel that a non-black attending a predominantly black school of any kind or just walking through such a neighborhood feels no "cultural tension". "Cultural Tension" is what makes traveling to foreign locales interesting and exhilarating. Real culture shock is an adrenalin rush.
Pre-law and African American Studies - quite an interesting combination. I wonder if he has considered why the drug and poverty culture he left behind would be worth holding on to. Or is he going to use a law degree to exploit the failed culture that he wants to hold onto?
I call BS on this article. The black guy is from Bryan, Texas which is the town adjacent to College Station, Texas and home of Texas A&M.
He had to go to a fairly decent high school because that is the only option.
I would buy some of this if he grew up in a poor part of Houston, but not Bryan.
He could have easily taken buses to A&M and hung out on campus.
Waiting for a story about how white students feel at black colleges
Thanks for the info on the schools in the BCS area and the reality check.
That is a wonderful YouTube vid. Thank you for posting!
Notice that he is studying Black History studies?
I went through this as a white woman seeking professional employment, as the first college graduate in my family. My mother was jealous and resentful and my father and brothers were patronizing and dismissive. My actual skill levels were rarely accepted by men at work except to claim that they did those things and deserved the credit. But it was all part of being among the first wave of Boomer women going to college en masse and entering the workplace with a higher aspiration than most prior generations of women.
Wasn't comfortable; and I still get routinely patronized by strangers and resented by friends and family after a long successful career when I embark on something unfamiliar to them. But Rome wasn't built in a day.
I can relate to a lot of this, and I’m white, not even a white Hispanic. I left home at fifteen, grew up on the streets, never finished high school, and felt completely out of place when I started college in my mid twenties. It is called growing.
It is called growing up.
The rest of this bilge is “feelings, nothing more than feeeeeeelings.”
That sums it up perfectly.
Do you think a big part of the problem might be that some blacks resent the fact they are no longer Priority #1?
My personal feeling is that most of the time, most of America has moved beyond race and that many blacks are unhappy about it.
Racism is no longer Center Ring and they yearn for their good old days when they felt relevant.
Once the mere accusation of racism was breath stopping.
Now it is a tired old joke that everyone has heard far too many times and the purveyors of racial animosity are now an irrelevancy.
Sounded like a cafone, you mean....
Possibly in some part. But I think it also has to do with hatred that has been instilled in them throughout their lives and also with power. As long as they can make white people feel guilty, they have power over them. Sowell, Williams, West, Carson et al do not desire and actually consider it quite ludicrous to want and to hold that kind of power.
It’s what Dr. Martin Luther King called “integration”. Why does Dr. King’s dream cause such heartburn among liberals and the neo-segregationist black community?
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