"DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER!"
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 met a guy from the hill in North Carolina, no kidding he called himself Captain Bridey but it was spelled Brady, I could barely understand the guy but he was a nice fella. He had grown up in a house with no central heating. Another Missouri lawyer I knew grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing, they thought about water, and they did but a water heater which sat unplumbed on the back porch all his childhood.....met the first one in the JAG Corps and the second one in central MO.
“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. “
Welcome to the world of anybody who went to college from a poor family, black, white or whatever. You will not be the same as you were before, which was part of the point of going; you will see things differently, and you will be different than the people around you, if they have done nothing similar themselves. Now get over it and get about your business.
haha good point
"DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER!"
Do you think it may partially be rooted in the difference between actually earning something or having it handed to you, unearned, because of skin color?
Another poster mentioned people like Colonel West and Dr. Benjamin Carson. I think people like them, like Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams communicate the self confidence that comes from knowing they are on solid ground - they know their subject matter and know they have earned their standing in the world.
On the other side of the coin are people like Eric Holder, Barack and Michelle Obama who know they have not earned the standing or awards that have accrued to them. People like that tend to come across as overly race sensative, thin skinned, defensive and more than a little too aggressive at every imaginary slight.
How much significance can Obama's Nobel Peace Prize really hold for him or anyone else who knows it was just another Affirmative Action token?
Even Obama knows that his award does not carry the same value or meaning as those of more worthy Nobel Laureates like Lech Walesa, Mother Teresa, Andrei Sakharov or Albert Schweitzer.
African-American Studies ?
During my college years, we students would talk about how we felt differently when going back home than when we were away at college. If you feel no impact, the experience is a failure. These students are realizing the world is more than their old neighborhood. If you don't grow, the experience is a failure.
If your language doesn't change in a manner to prepare you for the professional world while in college the experience is a failure. I'm heartened by the couple comments from students who saw ills and shortcomings of their communities when returning.
Are we supposed to believe first generation white students don't return and find their family or
Colleges and universities don't need to "engage" these students and "their communities" ... their idea of "engage" is to be more ghetto, more "familiar" rather than stay transformative.
These students could become ambassadors and leaders to change their local communities so more of their neighbors, friends, relatives see opportunities available and seize them. Unfortunately, that appears a lost cause. Given the community's self-image they'll be outcasts, sell-outs and the like if they don't maintain the duality or, like many white grads do, just move on to bigger and better things.
Is that why BO cannot speak one sentence without saying “uuh”, after having attended Harvard Law?
We are really trying to find the answer to that burning question
but he adopted the speech patterns and culture of the people around him.
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This is not a black thing, everyone adapts to the speech patterns/culture around them.
Make one for the bunny!!!
The “uuh” or “unh” has a direct correlation with if there is a teleprompter on site or not.
What a pantload.
Another BGI article [Black Grievance Industry].
Stay out of the kitchen, Blacks, if you don’t like the heat.
If I choose to go live and work in Japan for an extended period, is that entire country supposed to change to meet my need to feel like I’m still in America? Should they isolate me in a little American enclave that they are required to construct? Is that even what I would want?
Simply put for many in America racism is a business.
If your language doesn't change in a manner to prepare you for the professional world while in college the experience is a failure. I'm heartened by the couple comments from students who saw ills and shortcomings of their communities when returning.
Your "failure" criteria are well-structured and ought to be more explicitly stated as a goal for all college students, not just the minority groups. In the same way physical growth is sometimes painful, changes in the way we think can require some pain to our psyche, especially when one is so bought in to a false sense of "culture."
Gee: I bet I would feel the same way if I attended Howard.
I would probably feel the same way if I attended a party at the Playboy mansion. Or if I was introduced to the Pope.
This is a non-story.
It's from the UK/Brit-speak. Again, two countries separated by a common language.
I remember when Universities used to educate people, rather then get involved in social engineering.
BTW, did this boy pay for his education, or did he get a free ride due to his skin color?
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