Why foreign places stay foreign to students of color

Illustration by Khilosia Pruthvi

Attention to the facilitator of study abroad ads — well, all campus ads — with one black person on the cover: Congratulations, you’ve got us.

We think that one person of color (POC) peeking around the other students is living up to their fullest potential, that they’ve never been happier. They’re our glimmer of hope for inclusion and diversity, aren’t they? I mean look at that smile on black photo shoot extra #8’s face, who wouldn’t believe it? Those pearly white teeth, you would’ve thought it was a commercial for Crest.

Ad coordinator, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back for the hard work you’ve done. Now, the other people of color will look forward to seeing those smiling faces around and when they don’t, they’ll think of you.

Because no POC in the world has ever been in a circumstance where they’re the only person in a room who looks like them, let alone on a college campus, let alone in another country. No POC has ever felt like the “other” of a group. And racism has ended, there’s nothing to worry about.

Give yourself another pat on the back for believing any of that is true. It’s time to discuss study abroad student outreach, or the lack thereof, regarding POC’s.

According to the fall 2017 enrollment statistics, there are approximately 1,067 black students at NAU, not including graduate students or ones who transferred to another university. That’s only 3 percent, possibly less now, of our student population.

Now, take a teeny percentage of that small percentage, send them out of America with a group of people who are not only unfamiliar, but look nothing like them, who cannot relate in any aspect of what is it like to be different and shove them all into the same place for any time between four months to a year. Sounds magical, doesn’t it?

Most students of color who study abroad are extremely adamant about speaking to the right people and calculating the correct steps to do so. That’s not to say that someone shouldn’t have to do the research to find out about what that they’re interested in. However, most students of color don’t even know that studying abroad is an option for them.

Speaking from personal experience, and recently coming back from a country that had very few to no people that looked like me, being one of three people of color on the trip and being the only black person in my program, it was … an experience to say the least.

I know. I know. I chose to do that. However, what I did not choose was to be kicked in a foreign country for being black, having random people coming up to me and grab my hair, having fellow students on the trip try to strike up conversations with me about fried chicken, and then being shunned or ignored for trying to tell them that is was offensive.

The worst part was not having anyone there that was like me to share these experiences with or at least conceive the concept as to why these events were a problem.

So, with this information being brought to attention, what do we do about it?

Find out why POC's aren't studying abroad? Could we work on the retention rate and growth of students of color, in order for study abroad to be possible? Reach out to the POC’s that we have now and encourage travel? More scholarships that make studying abroad more realistic to afford? Let’s go with all of the above.

Or new students of color will think to themselves, “But the ad promised!” once they aren’t met with the same enthusiasm as extra #8 by their program group or the entire country that they travel to.

This was originally published on Jackcentral.org