Dark Faces In White Places

Coming from New Jersey it was expected that there would be many ways in which I would have to adjust to the new communities that would surround me. I had expected the roommate conflicts, time management issues, and difficult journalistic challenges, but I never knew that discourse would be my keys to evaluating my developing literacy in this community. The community that I feel like I am a part of is the discourse of attending Ohio University as an African-American student living in and attending a predominately white university.

Ohio University as a whole has a very unique discourse. It includes subcultures based on race, religion, location, and even educational choices. People view OU in a very one-dimensional way, and my time at this school has introduced me to communities, like the multicultural one, within the OU discourse that challenge this single dimension. Although the university tries to promote diversity on this campus it has not achieved much past the physical presence of minority students, and the frequent opportunity to have their pictures plastered on brochures, programs, and websites. It has been difficult to find an identity in the social aspects of coming to college that blends my connectedness to the black community with my desire to integrate with the overall student body as just a student and not a “student of color”.

Existing in a community where I didn’t share much of a common ethnic background carried over into my collective dormitory living experience. Being a minority in a very forced atmosphere I encountered people who had had little to no exposure to this kind of diversity, and even less instruction on how to deal with it with tact. For example, living with people who still feel it appropriate to refer to me as “colored”. Many of my experiences as a minority student makes me realize that we may not have come as far as we have thought, but the university attempting to address it; the dorm experience is most likely only a microcosm of experiences at large in the world.


In my experience the multicultural community operates separately from the communities of non-ethnic background. The goal seems not to distance ourselves, but to create a sense of community with people who understand the difficulties of not being heard or understood by most of the population at Ohio University. I never had the experience of being the single and only person of color in a classroom until I came to OU. Having a community of people that can relate to this feeling and understand this minority discourse without having to be preached at about diversity is also comforting. Not to say that the community on campus is like a big happy family, but it seems like an easier and more accepting transition to make as a younger student than trying to formulate a relationship with students who don’t look like yourself. It may seem kind of strange that people are more willing to make contact based solely off of race, but in this community as a whole its not uncommon to smile, wave, or strike up random conversation with another multicultural student just because they are one of the few ethnic people that you encounter in the day.

Language is an interesting thing at Ohio University because much of the discourse is centralized around the ways in which we communicate. Being able to understand other people and be understood in return is a major function to be successful in this community. Learning the dialect of the Ohioan culture proved difficult at times. This form of language builds a sense of community because when I got it down, I gained access into an exclusive group of people that I had felt foreign to during my arrival to OU. This same power of language can also break down a sense of place and community because of its ability to exclude people. The multicultural community here is small, and our specific cultural language make our community close but excludes us at the same time from the majority of white students on campus. Certain parts of language in general develop from communal experiences and for people who do not share similar backgrounds or experiences then their ability to do more than sympathize with that community is blocked. I had to use language as a minority that so that I can build relationships with people that run deeper than individual parts of my identity.





Knowing this discourse matters because this knowledge will help me to make the most of the next four years of my life. This exploratory year in college culture has opened my eyes in a way that I could not have experienced in my home discourse. I would say any situation that makes me more informed is a positive effect on my life, but learning the community literacy has opened my eyes to some negative things that I have had to interact with. For example the way our university represents itself in the yearbook as well as recruiting commercials completely ignores the multicultural community, as if this particular part of the OU discourse is non-existent. But, I think that the realization of imperfection is the most major part of community and personal growth.

By: Adrienne Green