This piece is written with inspiration from Sandra Rosa Bryant’s work “Studying Abroad On My Own Campus,” featured in the Autumn 2012 Arches publication. After reading her piece, her experiences and those of her peers feeling excluded, isolated, and underappreciated led me to think of how similar my University of Puget Sound narrative is. This piece is written in solidarity to hers, and one that has led me to reflect on my own experience at the university. 

Link to Bryant’s article here: https://www.pugetsound.edu/files/pages/arches/arches_autumn_2012/files/assets/seo/page18.html

What is the University of Puget Sound to me?

When first applying for colleges, I wanted to go as far from Tacoma as the eye could see. It was the beginning of my senior year of high school, and I had just moved to the North End after being raised in South Tacoma the first 17 years of my life, where the University of Puget Sound was far from on my radar. In all honesty I only ended up here due to the scholarships I had been provided, and this was incentive enough to stay. As I have come to learn, being a black student at Puget Sound has been both my greatest learning experience and my greatest hardship. 

Who am I to Puget Sound?

I first noticed a feeling of duality at the end of my first year. I spent most of the time in my first two semesters doing what I had done throughout all of my schooling: being in every club, taking every subject I could fit in a schedule, and making friends in every place I could. However, when getting to college with this same mindset, I felt a heightened emotional exhaustion unlike any I had felt before. I couldn’t put in the same effort, or at least I didn’t feel that I could. No matter how much extra I did nothing was going to be enough for others, and in turn, enough for myself. I grew more and more tired, skipping meals and grabbing the extra coffees, and sitting in the Anderson/Langdon lounge from dusk to dawn doing any and everything to feel ahead because the feeling of accomplishment just wasn’t present. 

How did I realize I didn’t belong?

I went into my second year on campus ramping myself up to do better than I had before, even if what I did before was actually my “best”. I found myself in a rut. I hadn’t come to this realization however until I found myself taking my first AFAM class, an Introductory course to African American Studies with Dr. Brackett. Of course, being in the midst of internal conflict, I did not realize the ways I reflected the oppression I lived by being a black student on campus, and more importantly one trying to leave a mark everywhere I went. There was a single concept we studied that both enlightened and intimidated me: double-consciousness. 

W.E.B. DuBois coined the term double consciousness.** For me, in my own words and reality, double consciousness is my: Blackness, womanhood, and Americaness. My life is seen and controlled by several lenses: my own lens and the lenses of others.  Everything I do is approached from this dual perspective from being both within and outside the dominant group, resulting in an inner conflict and tension I must grapple with every day. 

How do I define double consciousness…and how does double consciousness look for me, here at Puget Sound?

Once I learned what I was feeling had a term and was quite common for African Americans, I found myself reassessing the way I valued my work, why I valued my work, and where these feelings of validation actually came from. Once I noticed I relied so heavily on the external validation, I found myself more cognisant of my success, and more so seeing that I was and always had spread myself too thin to appease others. In the wake of recent circumstances, going virtual has granted me time to look inside myself, but also to metabolize this new version of reality I have found myself to be living in. I am not nearly as critical to myself, and find I am much more ambitious than cautionary about the way I converse with others, take on projects, and even how I approach academia in general.

How do I continue to move forward with this realization?

Being at the halfway point of my undergraduate experience at the university, I am always expanding on my knowledge of how I shape the world for myself, and how it in turn shapes me, for better or worse. However, out of these lessons have come excess labor, pain, and the necessity for resilience. I find myself growing and strengthening in my knowledge, love, and acceptance of self through being here, but will always find myself wondering if the oppression I feel on a daily basis is worth these lessons. I often find that there is a sort of sadness when thinking between the things I want versus the things I am as a black student at Puget Sound. However, having the ability to learn where these disparities come from in and out of the classroom and living as an active force against a recurring storyline for many like myself is greater than anything a single university could grant me. 

**”It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk