Talking Race: Space and Body

Posted in Arts, Autobiography, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2016-06-17 01:31Z by Steven

Talking Race: Space and Body

The Bennington Free Press
Bennington College, Bennington College, Vermont
2016-05-26

Samantha Barnett ‘19

I constantly think about how I move through space, how I claim space, how being mixed race means not knowing how my body will be identified. I think about how the first thing that I do when I walk into a classroom is count how many people of color are in the room. I think about whether or not they will identify me as a person of color; I think about how the professor already has. I think about being in an anthropology class, the discussion for the day being on race, the class divided into groups– there is one person of color per group. We’re here to “explain race.” I think about walking through my common room one day and listening to two white students saying, “Why do we call people of color ‘people of color’? It’s stupid, what can we call them instead?”

One of the first things that I’ve learned as a student of color at Bennington is how to hear what I’m really being asked…

Read the entire article here.

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