Black Students at Harvard Will Have Their Own Graduation

Black graduate students at Harvard spent the past year raising money for a graduation ceremony for blacks only, a first for the Ivy League school. The students who plan to attend the blacks-only ceremony will also participate in the all-inclusive main ceremony. According to one student, the separate ceremony is important for the black community because of historical racism.

Harvard joins at least four other universities in the U.S. that currently hold black-only graduation ceremonies. The practice is controversial and draws fire from critics for segregating the ceremonies. Rather than looking at the ceremony as segregation, students say it’s about community and fellowship.

I was not raised to believe that I was any different from other groups of people.

Students claim that having a separate ceremony is about celebrating success and letting others know black students can graduate like everyone else. This idea is not really trailblazing in 2017, considering the amount of successful black professionals that are working in the United States today. The U.S. has made leaps and bounds toward equality in a very short amount of time, yet it feels like actions such as this detract from that achievement.

Although Harvard boasts one of the “highest graduation rates for black students out of a list of 18 highly selective schools reviewed by The Journal of Blacks in Education (JBHE), some feel marginalized.” From learning materials to interactions with non-black students, Harvard is apparently a breeding ground for horrible conditions. I often read terms such as “microaggression” and “white privilege” during the course of my social media scrolling. I recently looked up the definition of microaggression to get a better understanding of what it means, and found that it is basically behavior that implies the question, “What do you mean, ‘you people!'”

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I belong to a mixture of two backgrounds that have been historically marginalized, decimated even. I am lucky enough to have knowledge of my heritage as it was incorporated into my upbringing. However, I was not raised to believe that I was any different from other groups of people. This served me well when I enlisted in the Army and found myself in the most diverse setting I had ever seen.

While I am proud of my culture and heritage, I don’t want to exclude others in the course of my achievements.  Those next to me contributed to my success, and we all shared it. I don’t find microaggression in my everyday life.  I don’t understand wanting a separate celebration based on skin color. I can’t imagine wanting anything less than the full honor of graduating with my fellow soldiers.

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Harvard students reportedly raised $27,000 to pay for the ceremony and reception. That’s a lot of money that could have gone toward making an actual difference “in the community” if these students were so inclined. That’s what I find insulting about the argument made by one of the participants who wants to “change the trajectory for all of us.” While these Harvard grads cry themselves a river over the $27,000 party they planned for themselves, they didn’t even bother including black undergrad students in the ceremony. But I thought this was a celebration of the black community as a whole. In true Ivy League fashion, even the segregated graduation ceremony is only for those with a graduate degree.

Angelina Newsom is a U.S. Army veteran and an OpsLens contributor. She served 10 years in the military, including a deployment to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. She studies criminal justice and is still active within the military community. This OpsLens article is used by permission.

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