The Catch-22 of living in a PWI

What’s interesting about living in predominantly white environments as a Black student is that their flaws are typically hidden in the background. In the foreground typically, in my experience, they are areas with well-funded school systems, parks, and other neighborhood amenities, and are often regarded as “safe.” They are desirable places to move to, and if you're Black and living in a PWI, it likely means your family has done pretty well for itself and can afford to live in these areas.

However, despite their benefits on paper, living in a PWI as a Black student in particular comes with some often overlooked challenges. PWIs, are, as stated, “Predominantly White”, so they often lack diversity of race. Due to this lack of diversity, typically, we as Black students can be forgotten, this is because leadership teams must cater to the major and don’t have the inherent instinct to think about us. This is not through their own fault, but through a systematic failure. We come in small numbers in these environments and tend to keep our mouths shut about our needs because, for one, you all won’t understand, but for two, we ourselves may not even understand.

What I mean is this: growing up in a Predominantly White Institution, I felt that I was no different from all of my white peers, in the beginning. This seems good, right? “Treat everyone equally,” they say, and everyone’s happy, racism is gone, and nobody is oppressed. But you can’t simply treat everyone the same. This brings up the often compared equality vs. equity argument. You can’t treat me the same because, simply put, I’m not the same. The internalized delusion of thinking you are the same as all of your white counterparts is a reality that doesn’t hit you until you’re older, when you begin to develop a sense of your own needs and, suddenly, they are vastly different from what you thought.

So, living in a PWI is often a privilege, because often PWIs are the “safer,” better-funded regions. Living in a PWI gets us out of the stereotypical poverty cycle in marginalized neighborhoods and allows us to integrate more with normal society. However, we must always remember that, no matter how integrated we become, our needs are not the same, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to needs.

Two things that I did not touch on in this article that I will touch on in a later one include the absence of appropriate Black role models and the uprise of microaggressions in PWIs that impact how Black students’ identities are shaped.