I, too, was Harvard — a girl from a working/middle-class family in
Baltimore, educated in public schools, who chose to wear all black and
cut my hair into a blue fauxhawk freshman year. That was 1986, a time
when I was both “read” racially, as a text by students and teachers, and
“wrote” my own racial code.
When one of my freshman roommates showed up, her parents found out I
was black. They asked her to move and tried to get the admissions office
to move her. To that roommate’s great credit, both she and the office
told them to take a hike.
Nearly three decades later, a group of Harvard students is bringing
ongoing assumptions about blackness to the fore, prompting me to reflect
on what may and may not have changed in the intervening years.
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