Background information about my project

I began this project as a part of my final assignment for my freshman year writing seminar, "Arts of Protest." The following is the statement I included, which gives a broad outline of my experiences, beliefs and goals.

As white person, my experiences as a student on Princeton’s campus should not be any different from the experiences of my black peers. I do not have to worry about feeling alienated because of my race or being the target of racial profiling. I can read plenty of articles about people of my race in the Daily Princetonian. When I walk around campus, I see more people with my skin tone than I can ever imagine knowing personally. Yet, my story is not the same as the stories of my black peers. Put simply, this is just not fair.

So far in my experience at Princeton, through my own observations and conversations with black students on campus, I have become more aware of the black undergraduate experience here. I feel that black student voices have not been prominent on campus. At a university with so few black students, these voices should be the most valuable.

In the 2011-2012 school year, 98 out of 1,298 freshman were black. This is about 7.55 percent of the freshman class. In total, in a school of 5,160 undergrads, there were 380 black students. Ultimately, a mere 7.36 percent of Princeton undergraduate students were black. Surprisingly, since the 2001-2002 school year, numbers of black students have decreased as enrollment has increased. Specifically, 9.28 percent of freshmen at Princeton in 2001-2002 were black.

For a while now, I have been fascinated by the lives of black men in the U.S. I have so much respect for those who have risen above the roles to which society has confined them, those who face ignorance and inequality and stereotyping and racial profiling and hate daily, those who have to tell their children explicitly how to behave around police officers so that they do not get killed like Trayvon Martin. 

I am passionate about race relations, civil rights and social justice. In high school, I participated in a program in St. Louis called Cultural Leadership, which exists to create a more just and equitable community by educating students to recognize and resolve issues of privilege and injustice through the lens of the African American and Jewish experience. As cliché as it is to say, my journey in this program changed my life. I now view the world through eyes that are quick to recognize segregation, racism and privilege. 

I attended a wealthy suburban public high school – majority white and about 18 percent black, with a large population of Jews. My high school was like many other high schools across the country; tracking had created a large achievement gap. There were few black students in accelerated or Advanced Placement classes. The only class I remember taking in high school with black male students was African American Studies.

The inequalities and injustice I witnessed in my school and community influenced the activities in which I chose to participate. I founded a Diversity Club to provide students with a comfortable venue to talk about “touchy” issues like race and privilege. I led a panel discussion of diverse high school students about their experiences in my school district for my district’s Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) leadership team composed of parents, teachers, administrators and school board members. SEED works to incorporate diversity into all classroom curricula and solve district issues surrounding difference, disparity and privilege. No black students wrote for my school newspaper, so I wrote articles about Black History Month and our school achievement gap to try to expose my white peers to the black perspective and the experience of black students in our school. Later, I started a bimonthly “Cultural Connections” column to write about stereotypes, racism, hate and inequities in my high school. My senior year, I led a “No Place for Hate ®” campaign through the Anti-Defamation League to combat bullying (and hate) in my school community.

In 2010, I was awarded the Princeton Prize in Race Relations for my work to “promote harmony, understanding, and respect among people of different races.” As a part of the award, high school student winners from across the country are flown to Princeton for the Symposium on Race. As one may guess, on campus, the first thing I noticed was the racial and ethnic segregation. I saw large crowds of white students getting ready for “houseparties,” while very few attended a multicultural event at the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding. In my essay applying to Princeton, I criticized this segregation on campus. As I reach the end of my freshman year, I can confidently say that the separation of racial and ethnic groups continues to be an issue at Princeton.

Although many of students that I spoke with said that their overall experiences at Princeton have been positive, my goal is to highlight negative experiences as an impetus for change. Through this project, I hope to provide a venue for my black male peers to share their stories honestly and openly to a public that needs to hear them.

My audience for this project is my white peers and white faculty members, those who are ignorant of the experiences of black students at Princeton, those who themselves may have contributed to the feelings of alienation and discomfort that my black peers have suffered. I would like to note that I have purposely excluded my peers and professors of other races and ethnicities in my audience because many of these individuals have had similar experiences and can relate to the stories that these black students have shared. My white community members need to hear the voices of black male students so that they understand that we do not live in a “post-racial” society; race continues to affect students’ everyday experiences at Princeton.   

All of my work is in black and white because my main focus is the relationship and inequality between black and white communities at Princeton. Initially, I wanted to present my protest solely through photographs of students, with a focus on quantity of stories and images, so that there would be a large number of eyes staring at the viewer of my webpage at one time. However, during my interviews, I found that my peers had so much to share about their experiences that it would be more effective to start with and build upon eight students’ stories. Many of the quotes were really potent when listened to, so I decided that I wanted to somehow incorporate audio into my presentation. Additionally, the Carl A. Fields Center was mentioned at some point in each student’s interview. My peers noted that the center’s distance from central campus prevented it from reaching its full potential as safe spot for black students and a place of interracial dialogue and intergroup interaction. Ultimately, I decided to film my own path to the Fields Center as the basis for a video. The video’s imagery is purposefully simple in that I want my viewer to focus on the power of what the students are saying. 

At this point, I have only had the opportunity to document the stories of eight of my black male peers. I say this because this “project” is something that I hope to continue working on until I have spoken with all of the black male undergraduates at Princeton and shared some aspect of each of their experiences on campus. Next year, as a fellow at the Fields Center, I plan to develop programming to help the center overcome the struggles it has faced because of its location and strengthen the center’s relationship with the general student body.

There are several goals that I intend to accomplish through my photo essay and video. First, I hope to expose the Princeton community to a voice that is often neglected. The number of black students at Princeton is itself a problem; I would like to demonstrate how having so few black undergraduate students has impacted those black students who do attend Princeton.  I believe that personal stories have a unique power to encourage discussion, and eventually, change. My voice does not need to be shared, but the voice of my black male peers does.