ABSTRACT

I felt out of place during most of my college experience. The only times I actually felt like I fit in were the quarters where I went abroad, where I was living in cities that were more multicultural or had more economic diversity. I am a black female, and the colour of my skin stands out here. And on top of that, I am from a low-income family. On this campus, when I look out I see white and I see privilege. I participated in service learning programmes here as a way to find other diverse spaces, but even then the assumption was that all the students in the programme should feel a great distance from the people we served in the next town over. But I didn’t feel distance. I just can’t escape being physically out of place here. Ironically, when I was on the overseas programmes though . . . being an American while abroad, well suddenly that put me into a new category . . . the category of privilege myself. Here in the U.S. as a child of parents from Ethiopia, I feel like people treat me with less respect than they would if I were white. Or wealthy. Or both. But when I was studying abroad in Cape Town [South Africa], in the eyes of the people I worked with there I was ‘American,’ so I was seen as someone with privilege. In some ways, I felt more at ease there too. Happier. Less anxious. I don’t know, I guess my body—this same body—can mean two very different things in different places: ‘disadvantaged’ here, and ‘advantaged’ there.