Introductions

Hi! My name is Mina, and during my first year of college, I became a womanist/black feminist. I know, how stereotypical. Radicalized my first year at a liberal arts college. But here’s my story.

I grew up going to mostly black schools and never quite feeling like I belonged with my black peers. As Nigerian-American, my upbringing and the culture I come from are very different from those of most Black Americans. That was probably why I had a hard time relating to my peers growing up (and other reasons I can ascribe to personality). That’s also why I didn’t mind forgoing my predominately black and Latino neighborhood high school and opted instead to attend a magnet school in a whiter, more affluent part of town.

However, I soon realized that just because I couldn’t always relate to my fellow black peers did not mean that I could better relate to my white peers (I was still stuck in the idea of the race binary: blackness vs. whiteness). I knew instinctively that the way I was relating to my peers and the way I was used to my peers relating to one another had suddenly become off, more off than usual. I knew it without being able to articulate it, that this had to do with my race or my class or the part of town I came from or my Nigerian culture or all of them simultaneously. I knew it without being able to articulate it that many opportunities I was passed up for, many of the recognition I failed to receive from peers had something to do with my race or my class or the part of town I came from or my Nigerian culture or all of them simultaneously. It wasn’t explicit discrimination and I doubt it was even intentional in most cases (but not all), but it was obviously there, marring every social interaction and constantly defining my place for me. And after feeling this acute alienation for four years, I got admitted into a very selective college and all my peers, of course, said it was only because I was black.

In college, all these “differences” (race, class, gender, religion, nationality etc.) and the hierarchical structures they create are heightened. I’m not sure if it has to do with the school I go to, the structure of college in general, or this time in our lives when we’re discovering who we are in relation to the rest of the world. Leaving high school and going to a college that I knew had an even smaller portion of people that looked like me, I felt like I could handle what it meant to be black and be completely racialized by others. However, stepping onto campus that first day, I did not realize that another part of my identity would soon come to define me so much: my gender. I was not prepared to be gendered in the way that I was. I realized that because of my gender, many people (males) felt they could speak over me and place their interests and thoughts above mine, naturally with no explanation.  

The more time I spent my first year getting to know so many people the more I realized I could relate not only to people who were most like me but also to people so different than me, but who had similar stories as I did of when they felt defined by some aspect or aspects of their identity. It made me want to learn more about others’ identities that were different than mine (different races, nationalities, religions, genders, sexual identities), but it also made me want to learn more about my own identity. I got involved in my schools African student organization, the Women’s Center, and the Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity. I got introduced to the ideas of womanism and intersectionality. I began using words like structural, epistemic, systemic, and problematic more often, and I began engaging in some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in my entire life. For the first time in my life, I had the words to articulate what I’d always known but could never describe before.

And that is why I decided to start this blog: to continue with my own exploration with these new ideas, hopefully share them with others, and continue to engage in dialogue about the intersectionalities that define our lives. Mixing academic thought (what little I have) with everyday observation and a bit of my personal brand of dry humor, I hope to document some of my musings on life, being a black, female, first generation Nigerian-American, Christian, upper-lower-middle class (my own term) student at a top 10 university in the United States.