How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

Author:Baratunde Thurston
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humor, General
ISBN: 9780062098047
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-31T06:19:30+00:00

Presitunde.

When I told Ken Cooper, the then-director of the program and former national editor for the Boston Globe, that I was going to Harvard, he didn’t hesitate: “Do the Crimson,” he said. I took his advice, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

The Crimson is a legendary institution. The daily has been around since 1873, is run by undergraduates with no oversight from the university, and claims some impressive alumni like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the technology investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson, and CNBC’s Jim Cramer (sorry!). The process of joining the staff is known as the “comp,” and generally people choose one department to comp: news, photography, graphics, et cetera. I couldn’t decide, so I went with news and photography. Over my years at the paper, I had a chance to cover a wide swath of campus activity, from student protests to the dean’s office to science and technology policy. Merging my technology interests with the paper, I became cochair (with Jennifer 8. Lee) of the first ever “online” department in the paper’s history. What I especially relished was the opportunity to have input into the staff editorial, the paper’s official position on affairs of the day. Sunday nights, I got to experience directly how diversity in media could affect what the paper published, through the mentorship of an older black student and executive on the editorial board named Dave.

In one of the first meetings of the Black Students Association I ever attended, older classmates warned us, “Don’t talk to the Crimson. They’re racist!” A series of incidents that had occurred before the arrival of The Nine Nine had led to a total collapse of the relationship between the paper and black student leadership. The advice I got was not only to avoid talking to the paper but also avoid working there. As a budding newspaperman, my missing the chance to work on one of the top college newspapers in the nation wasn’t an option. Enter Dave. We would often be the only black voices in the room when Crimson staff opinions were being debated, and I saw how he dropped in bits of perspective and knowledge, strongly advocated for certain positions, and often shifted the entire room. By engaging internally, Dave showed me an approach completely opposite of what I’d been told by some of the BSA leadership. The next year, Dave and I made a joint presentation to BSA members, encouraging them to join the paper, not just to affect the politics but also to take advantage of the ridiculous opportunities the place offered. If nothing else, it hosted some pretty sweet parties and was one of the few buildings on campus at the time to have a solidly working television.

Sure, race absolutely played a role in my Harvard experiences, whether friendships, political events, or other. But in general, the beauty of my Harvard experience is that I could often just be a student without having to actively and continuously think of myself as a black student.

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