HBCUs are HOMEs. Behave accordingly.
It’s a conversation I’ve had often over the years. Someone will learn how old I was when I first went away to college and they will inevitably ask how I handled the homesickness. I always tell them that I never felt any, that I don’t know what homesickness is because I never felt ‘away’ from home. I simply traded one home for another. By the end of my first week at Howard University, perhaps the most distinguished and certainly the most well-known of all of the country’s Historically Black Colleges & Universities, I knew that I belonged there. You can’t feel homesick AT home.
It should be worth mentioning that almost two decades’ worth of conversations with colleagues, peers, friends and co-workers of all races, colors, creeds, and nationalities reveal that the majority of people graduate from colleges and universities they choose to remember fondly. The football games and homecoming celebrations, the late nights spent talking about everything and nothing on your residence hall floors, the almost universal distrust of mystery meals served in the dining halls…that we all ate anyway. The parties, pranks, food fights and other minutiae of time spent in college that one keeps with them forever. These are not feelings particular to HBCUs or their PWI (Primarily White Institution) counterparts.
However, it should be noted that HBCUs will always be different. The Higher Education Act of 1965, enacted as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” an agenda to eliminate poverty and racial discrimination, defines an HBCU as “…any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans…”

Read that understanding this: at a time when black Americans were by and large finding it impossible to access institutions of higher learning, or would somehow find a way in only to be the object of ridicule and scorn every second of every minute of every day in every academic and social setting until they graduated or dropped out, schools were created that would allow them the benefit of education without reprehension, substituting ministration for opposition and obstruction. These schools, these HBCUs, immediately became much more than brick and mortar institutions. For the hundreds of thousands of people of color who attended them and continue to attend them, they have become safe places, homes away from home. In many cases they have been homes to students of color who never before had a home to call their own.

More so than a PWI, HBCUs work to live up to the idea of the college as an Alma Mater, literally a Bounteous Mother who works to give her children not only the benefit of her knowledge and experience but also one who works to ensure that those same children are safe and protected in their homes. This is not just because HBCUs work from a different perspective than many PWIs but also because of their size. It is far easier to make your campus feel like a home when there are only a few thousand attendees. Howard University, perhaps the most prestigious HBCU of them all, averages around 10,000 students. The largest HBCU, St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, counted a modest population of 11,200 in 2015. Compare that to Harvard’s 22,000, Michigan’s 44,000, Ohio State’s 66,000, or especially Arizona State’s 71,000 students and you begin to understand the difference. You could fit the nation’s entire HBCU population on the campuses of the five largest state universities, that’s how small they are. When you step foot onto an HBCU campus you are not just visiting a school, you are walking into those students’ homes and you should conduct yourself accordingly. Wipe your feet. Watch what you say.
When I was a student at Howard University many, many moons ago, I quickly realized that I could walk from one end of the main campus to the other in ten minutes. At the current school where I work and where I’ve spent the past few years, a similar walk can take me forty minutes or more. I have a great deal of affection for both places but if you want to know which one feels more like a home…well there’s no contest. No shade, as the kids say.
I say all this in response to the Buzzfeed interview that went up regarding the two young ladies who ate lunch in the Howard University cafeteria and then subsequently tried to make themselves martyrs for the alt-right cause in daring to suggest that it was wrong for Howard students to make them feel uncomfortable just for walking around wearing their newly screen-printed Trump shirts and Make America Great Again hats.

No. These are not young women being denigrated for exercising their freedom of expression. They are also not visitors who unknowingly broke an unwritten rule of visiting someone’s home. They are walking, talking, living breathing trolls, alt-right trainees who were warned by their black classmates that this was not something they should even want to do. But these young ladies knew they were about to “go viral” and so they put on their Trumptastic finest and sat in the cafeteria at an HBCU just a few days after Neo-nazis, neo-Nazi sympathizers and other “fine people” descended upon another college campus, ready to document the entire experience.
After all that, what happened to them? They were only made to feel uncomfortable. Someone took a hat, and then returned it. The black students in their group were embarrassed. They weren’t attacked, or harassed or threatened. Because even during a moment like this, most people still know how to conduct themselves in their homes even as their one remaining safe space is being purposely desecrated. And yet, somehow these girls still became famous (*Kanye West voice*) and ended up with more than a few interviews documenting such a heinous and harrowing experience. Their followers continue to increase and the message is reinforced that the harassers are in fact the very victims who deserve our sympathy.

Buzzfeed is The Washington Post of millennial audiences. If you’ve made it there, you’ve made it. And because she’s ‘made it,’ white tears everywhere can be shed over young Allie’s exclamation that it’s actually the black students at Howard “who are racist and disrespectful.”

This girl, her followers, and white-people-who-need-more-things-to-cry-over are seriously painting the picture of the bad, scary group of black savages ganging up on two poor, innocent doe-eyed saints who just love their president so much and were in DC to soak up the history of the region, despite them claiming that no one on their tour told them Howard was an HBCU in the first place, and asserting that they had no idea they would even be visiting the campus. The comments to almost every article I’ve found on this bring to mind the words of Malcolm X:
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
If you need a clear example of why Brother Malcolm is relevant, PLEASE CLICK HERE.
When a place becomes your home, it instantly takes on a deeper and more intimate significance than a simple collection of buildings, grass and landmarks. It becomes your safe space. It is where you can be vulnerable in the midst of the people who understand you, whom you trust and understand because they trust and understand you. The common denominators outweigh the differences. And honestly, being black is America is tough. In the words of Britney Wilson, “It’s hard for me to express myself/ cause I can’t protect myself if I’m exposed.” Out in the world, people of color have to keep walls up that white people will never understand. But at home, it’s nice to exhale and leave some problems at the door. When you can.
And remember this, if you are the kind of person who would dismissively refer to someone as a snowflake because they feel targeted by a shirt bearing the image of a man who repeatedly failed to genuinely and decisively condemn the actions of hundreds of people willing to discriminate based on ethnicity or the color of someone’s skin: one day you will find yourself in exactly the same position you once put others in. You will be in your safe space and someone will enter and offend you with their very presence and disposition. Right before you either melt or explode, I hope a light goes off and you realize exactly what I meant when I told you that HBCUs are HOMEs. It probably won’t though.
