My Boston Love Letter
DEFINING OURSELVES
Who are you?
Chiamaka Obilo (Harvard ’21) is a Black woman. When asked about all the pieces of her identity that make her who she is, she points to this as being the most important. She says you can forget everything else about her, but what she will always be is a Black woman. Chia shared with us that she sees Black women as the backbones of everything.
The HollaDay: Tell us more about Black women being the backbone — what do you mean?
Chia: Growing up I’ve been able to observe the complexities of being a Black woman. Being strong and a support system for everyone but also being vulnerable and tender and loving and nurturing. I see it all and I just love the humanity Black women are able to express. Honestly, I just pray I’m expressing that humanity to other people.
To be more specific about Chia, she is a Black woman from Roxbury. Being from Boston is super important to the space she takes up at Harvard but it’s also essential to who she is. Roxbury is her happy place and where she goes when she just wants to be herself completely and experience joy. What she shares as her life’s calling is service. Chia has been actively doing service since she was a kid and continues to this day. It’s the work she does but it also is how she identifies as a person. She told us that it guides her values around compassion and humanity. Chia is also Nigerian-American which influenced a lot of her upbringing. Part of that being how many languages she speaks. Chia mentions this is also a product of her being from Boston but she speaks Latin, Greek, Igbo, Arabic, and a little bit of Spanish. She loves learning languages and it helps her ability to connect deeper with the people she’s serving.
What do you do?
Chia shared with us about her academic and extracurricular work on campus. She simplified the explanation of her major down to stem cell research. For her, she sees this as the future of therapeutics and disease treatment. Chia suggests that you ask your doctor if there are any treatments based in stem cell research, and though you may not be able to afford it, she points out that it’s good to know all of your options so you can better advocate for yourself. Especially for Black people, it’s less and less likely that you’ll actually be presented with all of your options so practicing your self-advocacy by simply asking the question is a great place to start. Similarly, she served as an EMT on campus. This was important to her because she wanted to serve her Black and Brown peers. There aren’t many Black EMTs on campus so she made it her mission to pursue efforts of recruiting and retaining Blacks students in the program. We know our community best and where others may fail us, if we’re trained we have an opportunity to step in.
What is your involvement with Phillips Brooks House Association?
The Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) is an umbrella organization for a lot of different Service and Social Justice groups at Harvard that serve Boston and Cambridge. Chia is the immediate past Vice President and before that served as the Advocacy, Health, and Housing Program chair. As a Black woman from Boston she wanted to be involved with PBHA because she at a point in time received their services. Chia believes that when working on issues, the voices of the people you’re serving need to be heard and she wanted to use her position of power to ensure the voice of her community was being heard.
Especially because she was in leadership during the summer of 2020, which meant she was not only dealing with the violent impact of COVID-19 on the Boston community but also the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. Being in leadership during this time was a delicate balance because Chia was trying to hold up her public service which required energy and work and her Blackness which in this time, required rest. PBHA also does a lot of advocacy. They’ve done work on Harvard’s campaigns for prison divestment and fossil fuel divestment. They also hold the institution accountable for taking Sexual harassment and assult more seriouslt and ensure Harvard isn’t hiring abusers. PBHA also works on immigration and education reform and they partner with community organizations to expand their reach and show up in the community. PBHA’s work also includes training community organizers through their course that teaches students strategies and methods they can apply to topics they’re passionate about.
Chia volunteers as an after school director at the Blackstone School. Her time here forced her to think critically about her upbringing and how even though the Boston Public School system is very much racist and was working against her, she had some privileges being a Nigerian-American in comparison to her peers. At Blackstone, they’re teaching a lot of students who are either bilingual or only speak Spanish or Kreyol. This made it clear for Chia exactly how and where the school system is failing these students. Which also gives her a better perspective to bring to the table when she’s trying to advocate for these students and schools to the school board. Chia says that “what I should be doing is trying to kill the pipeline, but while we work on that I’m trying to work the system on behalf of my students.”
BOSTON
Why’d you stay in Boston?
“Why’d I stay here? Honestly, will I ever leave should be the question” For Chia, her decision was both an obvious choice but also wasn’t what she was expecting going into her college search. Harvard doesn’t admit many students from Boston, and definitely doesn’t admit many Black students — so the odds were working against her. Ultimately, in making her decision she had to keep in mind what she hoped to do in school. Chia’s goal was to bring resources back to her people and her community. She wanted to find a way to funnel these resources back into Boston and saw the most direct path for that very clearly at Harvard. This was in part because of Harvard’s proximity to Boston but also because of the sheer amount of resources they have available. This would give her an opportunity to focus and press the institution to have Boston on their agenda.
“I came to Harvard so my kids don’t have to. My daughter will be able to go wherever she wants to go”
Chia didn’t want to neglect recognizing the amount of struggle and sacrifice other people made for her to be here as well. She gives that love and recognition to her community, whether that’s her family, her church, or the guy who cut her dad’s hair — everyone played a part in providing her this opportunity and “Harvard isn’t a place you can just turn down when you’re standing on the backs of others.” The people who supported and sustained her while she was at Harvard, mainly Black women, were also super important for her to send love to. In the end, Chia shares that Harvard wasn’t her first choice but the ancestors pulled her this way. To her, she was opening doors for the future saying, “I came to Harvard so my kids don’t have to. My daughter will be able to go wherever she wants to go.”
What has your experience been like?
Chia’s experience at Harvard has been one where she’s chased after everything she came to do. She expressed to us that she came with a vision rather than a plan which has helped her be flexible in the paths she takes to achieve her overall goal. But mainly what she wanted to emphasize was that as much as she’s from Boston and from this community, she recognizes that she isn’t the exact same Chia anymore. You want to stay strongly rooted and grounded in where you come from, but Chia tells us “I can’t disregard this privilege I’ve acquired and will never not have after going to a place like Harvard.” She says that reckoning with her privilege is a challenge but one she takes on with joy because she knows it’ll better help her serve her community.
HOLLA!
What is your mantra?
“Small is good, small is all” Chia points out that it’s really easy to get bogged down in the vision, where we are in the moment can be really disheartening, but this quote is important in reminding me what is really important. It reaffirms that small is good enough, it’s a crucial reality check. As a Black woman you can feel powerless even when you know internally how powerful you are. But these small acts that go unnoticed are good, they’re everything. We can’t get anywhere without them. Small things are the building blocks to the future you’re trying to seek.
How do you define Black joy?
C: Black joy is Blackness without bounds. It’s an opportunity to be ourselves without being restricted by others. I’m thinking about how, growing up in Boston, it wasn’t a good thing to be Black — but now, everybody wants to be Black. But real Black joy is having your Blackness not be policed. You’re able to do you own thing, you’re not pleasing anyone
C: A lot of people won’t listen to your Black narrative unless it has to do with struggle and suffering. But Blackness is not trauma, that’s the only time it’s seen as important, but Blackness is so much more. So part of growing beyond that is that pride of being Black, pride in our ancestry, our culture, our languages. Black joy is Blackness without bounds. Right now that’s only privileged to whiteness, but I hope one day we can all attain that level of personhood.
Our conversation with Chia was a time of pure joy. She is so self-aware and reminds us all to take the time to reflect on the systems we contribute to. Our community is better with her here, forever and always.
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