August 16, 2020 by Lydia Dasari
“White students get to go to college and be just a student if they want. While the rest of us have to be students, workers, Diversity and Inclusion educators, community advocates, advertisement actors, and high school student recruiters.”
— An anonymous student at Northwestern University posted by the Twitter account NU Confessions
I am a woman of Color at Cal Poly. I stick out like a sore thumb. They cannot miss me. And yet, they don’t look me in the eye. They don’t take the empty seat next to me. They don’t turn to me first for group projects.
So, I work hard. I’m an Honors student. I make Dean’s list. I have four minors and a goal of graduate school. But that is not enough.
So, I participate in the Cal Poly stereotype. I love the beach and I like to hike. I joined a mainly-white student organization. “Mr. Brightside” is genuinely one of my favorite songs. Embarrassing? Yup. But somehow, it’s still not enough.
I am a woman of Color at Cal Poly, and I am not enough.
Know that my experience is far from unique. Students of Color in every facet of campus life endure all this — and worse — on the daily. Check the CPX results, in which students described Cal Poly as having “A negative DEI brand image, [being] a ‘good old-boy school’ and known as ‘a White, wealthy school, where your diversity is not welcome.’” Even in familiar circles, we struggle to feel at home here. When I ask to have unconscious bias training for my student organization, I am secretly asking that my peers —and friends— check their unconscious bias against me.
Cal Poly’s experience with racism did not begin or end after a white student sported Blackface in the spring of 2018. In regards to race, the overall picture of campus culture is not pretty — it’s dumpster-fire bad, actually — but there is hope.
Hope at Cal Poly looks like the students of Color who work to make this campus more welcoming. We work so, just maybe, next year’s incoming class could be even marginally more diverse than the current.
Take Monique Ejenuko (she/her), for example. As one of two Black journalism majors, she joined Mustang News as their Diversity and Inclusion Editor. That position was dissolved at the discretion of an all-white leadership within months of her starting.
Monique describes the experience as emotionally taxing. While deliberately trying to get news coverage on students of Color and LGBTQIA+ students, she realized that she was working for journalists... who should inherently be covering diverse perspectives. Monique explains that being let go from Mustang News felt as if the leadership was saying that they didn’t care to report on students of Color unless the story was as severe as blackface.
Despite the challenges she faced from the organization, Ejenuko poured her time into Cal Poly by working at the MultiCultural Center and participating as the sole student representative in the journalism department’s Diversity and Inclusion committee. If that’s not enough, she was also president of the Black Student Union during her final year on campus. Intense, huh?
Like Monique, I found myself hyper-involved at Cal Poly. I spent my first fall quarter searching for some sort of positive representation of myself, a brown-skin daughter of immigrants. When I couldn’t find a place on campus that catered to my needs, I joined Poly Reps with the intention of recruiting more and more students of Color. At the same time, I worked at the MultiCultural Center and later participated in the WSCUC 2022 accreditation committee for campus culture. There, I could make student recommendations on the administration’s work of examining our current climate of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Similarly, my roommate Emily Calderon (she/her), who identifies as Latinx, is an intern with the MultiCultural Business Program. She spends over 20 hours a week dedicated to supporting ethnic minorities within the Orfalea College of Business (OCOB). Concurrently, she is the Vice President of a Latina-interest sorority on campus, and has participated as a host and an organizer for admitted underrepresented high school students through PolyCultural Weekend.
And in true student-of-Color-at-Cal-Poly fashion, my friend Manmit Chahal (he/him) ran for Associated Students Inc. president on a diversity platform while simultaneously heading Mustangs United, planning a conference for South Asian students, being a peer mentor for underrepresented students in College of Liberal Arts, serving on the Student Diversity Committee, organizing for PolyCultural Weekend, maintaining a board position for the Indian Students Association, and more.
Impressive? Definitely. But for us of Color here at Cal Poly, it’s a familiar trope: Campus diversity sucks, so we get involved to fix it.
To this day, almost every student of Color whom I have met actively participates in some sort of inclusion effort on campus. Yes, these activities are typically fun and often look fantastic on a resumé, but we pursue them out of necessity, not for gratification.
We are tasked with the unspoken responsibility to diversify and serve the same campus to which we pay tuition. Whether it is working with TEDx or serving as a Greek Life Diversity Chair or volunteering with ASI, students of Color are burdened with confirming our own validity. It shouldn’t be this way, and, for white students, it isn’t.
I adore my white friends at Cal Poly. Kind, smart and care-free, they are the epitome of a privileged life. They embody the unofficial Cal Poly motto of “work hard, play hard,” going to class,then laying out at the beach. By no act of their own, they are (rightly) entitled to a safe, comfortable and enjoyable education. It’s beautiful to watch them truly enjoy an enriched college experience.
For that, I also envy my white friends at Cal Poly. Walking around campus, people look them in the eye... and smile. The empty seat next to them always gets filled and they never have trouble finding a partner for a group project. When they join an extracurricular, it is for pleasure or for pass time or for career development, but never for validity or out of necessity. They are always enough.
White students at Cal Poly have the distinct, inherent privilege of simply being just a student if they so choose. They never need to educate others about microaggressions, racial slurs or prejudices in acts of self defense. They are never surprised by their own face on an admissions poster after a photographer catches them with their two ethnic friends. White students don’t feel that nasty pit at the bottom of their stomachs knowing that they may never truly feel at home on campus if the next class of freshmen isn’t more diverse.
Students of Color equally deserve to be unbothered at school. We deserve to join the hammock club and take naps under the Avila pier and not question our own ethicality when marketing Cal Poly to others like us. Instead, we are full-time students, employees, advocates for diversity, spokespeople for entire communities, high school student recruiters and models for advertising. We are also exhausted.
I want to call attention to the unique dichotomy that is so often overlooked between white students and those of Color at Cal Poly. There is an immense amount of explicit and emotional labor that is silently expected of us and remains unknown to the hegemony. For us, extracurriculars are dictated by the drive to be known and loved and valued on this great, big, grown-up campus that is just barely taking its first little baby steps toward inclusion.
I deeply wish that I had a solution to bridge the giant gap between white students and those of Color. However, until significant changes are made at the institutional level, students of Color at Cal Poly will continue to be exhausted. We will continue to pour our out-of-class hours into diversifying this campus, and it will continue to be our greatest collective hope and our greatest collective stressor.
See us. See our work. See our exhaustion. When the administration fails to support us, we support one another, and one day, we will be enough.