The honest conversation about 'black kids'

If you go to Hopkins, you're not happy. Morgan students are happy. You should meet some. Two of my best friends started at Morgan last month, and they're ecstatic. They came to visit me last night, and their jubilance contrasted so intensely with the dismal, bleak faces which have started haunting campus since class started.

It was baffling to see young people so proud of their choice in higher education; confusion is too weak a word to describe what my suitemates and I experienced. I thought it was due to lack of studying on their part, but one of my friends had a paper due that night and hadn't been out partying since their classes started in August ... and he was strangely happy about it. After an hour of astonishment, I just had to ask, "What happened?" and I figured it out, Morgan students are happy because they go to what is called a Historically Black College.

Almost every black student has thought about going to an HBC. Most have applied to one or two. There are two rather esteemed ones in the area ?- Morgan and Howard State, and then there's the lesser-known Coppin. For a lot of kids, an HBC is the only real vision of college. As a kid raised in Baltimore, I never thought about going to Hopkins. Morgan was very real for me, though. My mother attended classes there; my cousins are currently enrolled at Morgan. It was like A Different World right down the street.

I don't know if white people know this, but there's a generation of black kids who wanted to go to college just because of A Different World. A Different World was a spin-off of The Cosby Show, but foucusing on black characters in college. I thought I was going to be Dwayne Cleophus Wayne (yes, I used to have flip-up shades that clipped onto my glasses and a high-top fade), and who wouldn't want to be? At Hillman (Dwayne's alma-mater), tradition, culture and activism were at the forefront of the college experience. They had conversations about apartheid and institutionalized racism and sexism. They discussed and confronted issues like AIDS, police brutality and drug abuse. They did all of that inside and outside of the classroom, and all in 22-minute installments!

The reality of black schools didn't even have that much to do with the show's appeal, but that's what I thought black schools were like. I know it wasn't like that on Boy Meets World when Corey went to college, and it's certainly not like that here at Hopkins.

Having visited Hopkins many times last year, my friends were used to the change in scenery. The one thing that did kill my guest's joy, though, was an ad in McCoy's lobby for the forum with Beverly Tatum, author of Why Do All of the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria? I was completely in favor of the book because I thought it would provide a discussion starter that would lead to more than just an immediate rejection of the book. Unfortunately, it didn't. The advert - to me - only read "Black Kids! Cafeteria! Intrigue! Come meet..."

Of course this wasn't really the language the poster used, but that is the impression it gave. The lack of creativity put into the event suggests to me that the Hopkins administration was interested in merely having a discussion about race - no matter how perfunctory - without making students, black or otherwise, feel engaged in it.

I know why black students usually sit with each other in the metaphorical campus cafeteria. When a kid first starts high school or college, he's vulnerable. It's easier to trust someone that looks like you. You make certain assumptions about certain shared experiences and upbringings. It's a point of conversation. You'd be surprised at how many friends I've made just by walking up to the only other black kid in a room and saying "Man, white people ..." With Hopkins, specifically, the black student body was just overtly more interesting.

I've met an array of intriguing people of all races, but it was the black kids that were screaming about gay rights at lunch. It was the black kids who were passionately arguing about poetry. It was the black kids who were talking about why we sat together all the time. We had conversations reminiscent of A Different World amongst ourselves and were doing what we had always idealized about college.

My friends and I had that conversation at the "black table" in Fresh Food Caf?? last year. They have that conversation at Morgan. They most certainly had that conversation at the Pit. The question is: why do most Hopkins students need assigned reading and a public forum to have it? Why can't conversations about race be sustained by the type of genuine debate I have with my friends? Why can't we have honest conversations instead of structured ones? Perhaps that is the type of conversation Hopkins needs if it wishes to legitimately address issues of race.