being the only black girl in a class of white people

Dear Readers, 

Here’s the worst part about being a writer and being Black: the amount of other BIPOC people you’ll find is far and few in between. The shitty part of classes and graduate school? I can go weeks without saying a word, weeks without a single opinion or critique of the literature. Maybe it’s worse that my professor doesn’t create a space that I feel welcome in, or maybe it’s worse being ignored by my peers. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gone to private schools for most of my life, I know what it’s like to be the token Black Afro-Latina girl in the class. I was the sounding board for all things POC, but I normally had a friend or two who would thug it out with me. Alternatively, I had professors who connected me to the lesson even if I couldn’t relate to the piece. Now that I’m in graduate school, I see even fewer people who look like me. Or at least people aren’t White, people who at least get it. Now I’m struggling to build a community in New York of POCs in higher education. Statistically, there are so few of us in graduate school that everyone counts. 

It matters to know that when I talk about code-switching, cultural and racial divides, and confusing aspects of my identity, someone is listening, hearing, and understanding what I’m saying. It matters that in a year of graduate school classes, weekly workshops and readings, etc, I have only had TWO POC professors. It matters that in my class we read about art and literature by people who aren’t White because I’m not White and it matters to me to hear voices that are similar and differ from mine. It matters because, in an entire semester, I don’t think we’ve read a single Black author. It matters because I have just as much of a right to be there as anyone else does and yet my education isn’t being taken seriously. 

I value the voices of the underrepresented, as a person from that community, and I don’t appreciate my professors choosing to teach me about BIPOC cultures, from White authors who exploited the communities they entered to create “art” or proof that BIPOC aren’t “savages” or “desultory”. 

I hope professors like this one are ashamed for limiting the education of their students. 

I hope professors like this one are ashamed for limiting the education of their students. 

I can’t help but wonder how many other BIPOC feel this way, feel isolated in their small classrooms of 10 with no one else to relate to. I wonder about how many of us are out there, burnt out and defeated because we haven’t received the support from administration and professors. It's truly heartbreaking.

-Sofia Villafaña