July 2, 2025 • 22 mins
In this deeply personal episode, I reflect on my experience as a Black Generation Xer attending a predominantly white university in the years after the civil rights movement. While my dreams were shaped by stories of HBCUs, my reality landed me in a space where I was one of the few — constantly navigating identity, isolation, and subtle forms of exclusion. From culture shock to classroom dynamics, I unpack what it meant to pursue higher education where representation was nearly nonexistent and support often felt just out of reach. This is more than a college story — it’s a lesson in survival, self-discovery, and reclaiming pride in spaces not built for us.In this deeply personal episode, I reflect on my experience as a Black Generation Xer attending a predominantly white university in the years after the civil rights movement. While my dreams were shaped by stories of HBCUs, my reality landed me in a space where I was one of the few — constantly navigating identity, isolation, and subtle forms of exclusion. From culture shock to classroom dynamics, I unpack what it meant to pursue higher education where representation was nearly nonexistent and support often felt just out of reach. This is more than a college story — it’s a lesson in survival, self-discovery, and reclaiming pride in spaces not built for us.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
And in the good evening everyone and Tony Tony Reeves
to read Tony red by following the news and any
wat shape them or no sortage of things to talk about.
What will this is a reality. We simply have to
(00:22):
let me read, let me read. The go ahead and
kids started, Hey, every want Hey, welcome, Welcome, welcome, Welcome,
as always, I appreciate you. This is Tony Reeves. Let's
just go ahead, get this thing started. I want to
talk to you about the perception of college and then
(00:45):
the real world experience of college. You know, for a
lot of us, when we're preparing future generations and kids
and talking to them about going to college, if they
haven't had a chance to visit the school and really
do a deep dive into the school itself, well it's
very easy to have this perception about what the experience
is going to be like. Now, let's just be clear.
(01:06):
Most kids when they're coming out of high school really
have no clue what college is going to be like.
So the idea that you know, they go and go
on a few tours and talk to the people there,
is going to give them this full breadth of experience
or knowledge about what they're going to experience. Yeah, that's
all well and good, but the reality is that that's
the best case scenario then for the vast majority of
(01:29):
kids who never even take that opportunity or have the
opportunity to visit the campus. And so what ends up
happening is that you have a perceived reality and then
the actual reality. And I can tell you that that's
magnified even more so when you are moving from one
culture into another. So I want to talk to you
(01:50):
about what it means, you know, what it meant, especially
for me as a member of Generation X, a black
member of a Generation X who found himself as a
black student coming from a predominantly black environment and going
and attending a school that was ninety five percent white.
And more importantly, I want you to understand why this
(02:12):
conversation is important today as we are finding kind of
this reshaping in terms of the educational environment. The overturning
of not really the overturning of Brownie Board as much
as the Students for Fair Admission has kind of indicated that,
you know, giving preferential treatments for race for purposes of
(02:33):
school and mystery and so is consider unconstitutional and what
that means for the landscape of students who find themselves
coming from different cultures and moving into a space already
knowing that they're going if they're going to a place
that is predominantly white, what that man actually mean for them?
And more importantly, how what was my experience? So let's
go ahead and jump to it now. For me, it's
(02:57):
kind of an interesting phenomena because I grew up, I graduate,
graduated in high school in nineteen eighty seven. So let's
kind of pause for the people who've never been in
that generation to understand what that landscape looked like. For me.
I am the child of the Civil Rights Movement. You know,
my mom came out of that era of the Civil
(03:18):
Rights Movement, all of her brothers and so forth like that.
But you know where their experience was focused on going
to historically black college and universities, with the Civil Rights Act,
the Voter's Rights Act, Fairhousing Act, desegregation of schools, and
just kind of just push towards and encouraging kids of
color to go wherever they wanted to go. That was
(03:41):
my reality. But the reality is is that I didn't
visit any college. So a lot of my perception of
the university life was really shaped by a few things. Now,
I would say school Days is one of them. School
Days came out in nineteen eighty eight. I was halfway
through my freshman year at that time, but probably the
biggest one probably be A Different World. And the reason
(04:04):
why A Different World and I'll say School Days was
really powerful is that it gave me the impression of
what it was in terms of the black college experience,
whether you know it or not, if you attended an HBCU.
And I'm going to tell you this full disclosure, I
didn't go to an HBCU, but there was an HPCU
(04:26):
in my hometown, University of Arksas Pine Bluff, and I
had several family members who attended. When I see or
when I watched a show like A Different World or
even School Days, there is this enriched nurturing environment in
terms of what it means to attend one of these institutions.
(04:48):
And so you would think, oh, man, you know with
family members and one in your hometown. And even with
these representations that for the first time we're seeing because
keep in mind, School Days and Different World was probably
the very first representation of what it was like to
go to college. For persons of color. Now, don't get
(05:08):
me wrong, there's references in pop culture here and there,
but in terms of centering black students and media or
in the arts and so forth, these were probably our
two bedrock movies. You know, We've had countless ones afterwards
that kind of touched on it, but these two really
set the tone in terms of showing kids who were
(05:31):
thinking about college what college life was like. So this
gave not only a full throated opportunity for kids who
were trying to go to college to see what college
would look like, but it definitely was a great place
to showcase what the environment was at historically black colleges universities.
So when you have all those things, you would think
to yourself, okay, with that backdraw, what made you not
(05:56):
want to go in that direction for somebody like me? No,
for me, I've often told people that I went to
the University of Tampa, which is malma mater, for the
wrong reason, And he said, what do you mean by
the wrong reason? And no, it's nothing like saying, well,
you know, I black schools weren't going to prepare me.
(06:16):
Oh no, no, you know, you know I need to
go to a school like that No, I went to
the University of Tampa because I was trying to impress
a teacher, just that simple my JRTC instructor. Why guy
figured out I throw that little extra caveat out there.
Who I felt that he should have given me greater
(06:37):
reverence than he did. I had, you know in my mind.
You know, he was someone which he didn't know at
the time, that I gave great degree of reverence to
in part because he was he had served as an officer,
he was a major in the Air Force. He was
you know, what I looked at him was not necessarily
(07:00):
extension of my family members, but recognizing that he served
in relation to the fact that all the men in
my family who I looked up to, because almost all
my uncles was the exception of one served and my
grandfather served. So earning his respect was something that was
very important to me, and I didn't think I necessarily did.
And so it was funny because he was regularly promoting
(07:22):
this school to students in different some of my fellow cadets,
but he wasn't doing it for me, Like he was
not encouraging me to pursue this school as an option.
I couldn't understand why because in my mind, and this
is just kind of the way I looked at it.
You know, I'm looking at my academic background. I'm thinking, Okay,
(07:44):
the kids that he's talking to don't have the same
acad acumen that I do, or the kids that he's
talking to don't have the background that I do. So
I'm sitting here feeling some kind of way by the
fact that he is putting all of his attention and
encourage them. Now, let's be clear about something. He might
have done that because he probably thought I didn't care
(08:05):
about his opinions. He might have done that because he
thought I had other options, because I did have a
stang attitude back in those days, so I could tell
you that for sure. And sometimes I wasn't always approachable
about certain things. So I could see from his standpoint,
not saying that he had one, because I've never talked
to him about this, but from my standpoint, I could
not understand why he wouldn't, you know, why he wouldn't
(08:31):
push me to go to this thing. So I put
all my eggs in one basket, and let me tell you, listen,
I put all of my eggs in one basket to
go to their school. Now, keep in mind the vast
majority of my family members attended HBCUs and I had
(08:51):
two uncles who you know. I had one one uncle
graduate from Universe Farkstaw, Pine Bluff. My mother graduated from
University of Arksas Pine Bluff after starting at Tuskegee. I
had a cousin of mine that was at more House.
My uncle had went to Howard and Maharry. You know,
my grandmother had went to school at the University of
Arkansas Pine Bluff. So I had a deep connection. And
even my mentors had went to University Arkansas Pine Bluff.
(09:12):
So I had a lot of people who had the
ability to guide me and provide insight. I wasn't listening
to them. I'm gonna go to the University of Tampa.
So here I go, and I go down there, and
let me be the first to tell you. I didn't
visit the school, didn't visit the campus. And I went
there and in one phrase, I was not ready. Now,
(09:37):
for those of you who are sitting here going dang man,
they just beat you at the door. No, no, no,
no no. When I said I wasn't ready, I didn't
know what to expect. The only thing I knew about
the University of Tampa is from what I heard, you know,
second hand, from my RTC instructor talking to other cadets,
and the brochure I got from the school. It didn't
(10:01):
have any of the things that I had normally been
used to. There was no football program, which is I'm
big about sporting football. They didn't have a track program.
They had a cross country didn't recognize what that was,
but I like track didn't have that. It's prominent sports
were soccer, baseball, and basketball. The school. You know, I
came from a town that was seventy six percent black,
(10:23):
went to this school which was ninety five percent white.
I was completely unprepared for what this world was going
to look like. So now here I am on this
small campus and the school is probably somewhere about fifteen
to two, somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand students.
It wasn't even so much about going there and realizing
(10:48):
that I was in a culture that was ninety five
percent white. It was also a lot of the little
things that made me feel isolated. And you would say, well,
what do you mean by isolated, Well, you know, I
had a few things that happen. I can still remember,
literally the first couple of weeks at the university, one
of the exercises they had with us, when we were
(11:10):
on our floor, the resident advisor asked everybody to tell
everybody out loud the schools they had the opportunity to
attend and then indicate why they chose this school. Of course,
everybody talking about all these schools, and when they come
to me, all the schools I was listing were HBCUs
and this was the only one that wasn't an HBCU.
(11:30):
And I can still remember, still remember this young lady
turning to me saying, white, young lady, it's a good
thing you didn't go to an HBCU, because that's not
the real world. I didn't know what to do with
that information. I'm like, what do you do with that?
And you know, I'm eighteen years old, you know, fifty
(11:53):
six year old me would have had a much different response.
But I didn't know what to do to do with
that information because in my world, all the people that
I looked up to went to HBCUs. From my world,
my mentor went to an HBCU. In my world, my mother's,
my uncle, my uncles, the people who shaped my life
(12:15):
went to HBCUs So to imply that this school, these schools,
were not the real world. I didn't understand what that meant,
and I didn't know how to respond to it either.
And then it was another thing that it was interesting
because I'm sitting here and I can still remember going
(12:37):
around campus and I joked about this to somebody. I said,
every year at the University of Tampa, I got pulled
over by the police at least once. University of police
pulled me over every year. By the time I was
a senior. They knew me by my name. And you know,
it's easy because you know, there's a way to be
self defeating and say, oh, you know. Part of it
(12:58):
is because the way I was just no, no, no,
when I walked around campus and I was minding my
own business the number of times and I'm not saying
they didn't pull anybody else. I just know I never
saw them pulling anybody else over. I got pulled over
all the time, so much so that by the time
I was li sing year and they pulled me over,
they were like, oh, hey, Tony, And I'm thinking, I
(13:19):
don't know if I should be proud that they recognized
as I'm a student, or offended that it took them
four years to get to this point because they should
have been able to notice the first time they pulled
me around, and then even getting the opportunity to find
my safe spaces was a wild phenomenon because for me,
I was looking for communities of people to bond with,
(13:42):
and for me, bonding with those people typically involved connecting
with people who look like me. And I can still remember,
still remember having this one student pulled me to the
side and look at me and say, hey, why are
you you know, why are you guys? And when he
says you guys, as you're talking about students of colors
segregating yourself now again, wasn't sophisticated back in the day,
(14:07):
because in my mind now I'm like, well, first of all,
we can't segregate ourselves. That's something that an institution has
to do to separate us by force. We are choosing
to assemble with each other, and of course it's a constitution.
We can assemble freedom of assembling, no problem there, But
for this particular portion purposes in school, we are choosing
to assemble with people who are have similar interests from
(14:32):
similar backgrounds with you and creating a safe space for
us to be able to communicate culturally and engage culturally.
But the more powerful thing is one, if you don't
recognize that's what we're doing, that's bad on you. But two,
why must we not a symbol as opposed to you
(14:55):
coming over to assemble with us? Again, didn't even think
about it from that light because in my mind I
didn't realize that this was going on so here. Literally
within the first two years, first few years, I had
somebody questioning. I have people literally who are questioning me
to say, oh, you know you went you know, we
(15:16):
needed to ask why are you assembling with other people,
or they're basically coming at me and telling me that, oh,
I made the right move going to basically going to
a white school. All of these experiences underscore to me
that I wasn't sure if I was in the right place,
and a lot of this happened, and sadly enough, almost
(15:36):
everything I just described, with the exception of me getting
pulled over every year, everything happened within the first couple
of months of getting there. So I tried to balance
this out and so what I ended up doing, because
you know, the easy thing you could say is well,
just leave. If you don't like where you're at, just leave.
(15:58):
And for some reason, I liked the school and I
decided to do something a little different. I decided to
build my own culture. And what do you mean by building?
And let's just be clear, if you're if you are
a minority student on a predominantly if you're a black,
especially a black student on a predominantly white campus, you
(16:19):
know the importance of building your own culture. And usually
building your own culture usually encompasses organizations that tend to
focus on students like you, like for us, it was
the Association of Minority Collegians, which is what I was
a part of, and then the International Student Organization, So
we were the two premier organizations for students of color.
(16:41):
We did not wait for the university to create a
culture for us. So what we did is we found
ways to create things for us. Like the running joke
that I used to tell people when I was coming
up is that I'd gone to plenty of parties at
the University of Tampa and the various white fraternities and
(17:01):
sororities and so forth like that. Invariably, none of these
parties ever felt like they had me and mine. The
music was never music that I would normally listen to.
More importantly, music I didn't feel like I could dance
comfortably too. So we started doing little things like we
put on an event called the Studio where we would play.
We basically pick a room at the basement in one
(17:23):
of the dorms and so forth, break out the DJ
booths and boom, have some music, and that would be
our thing. The other thing was we did talent shows.
We did something that was called the Apollo Night, which
became an annual thing for us to showcase skills and
do something again that was culturally focused on us. And
(17:44):
I will tell you during that time, I found my
voice and I found my comfort because listen and the
reality is is that I realized, and really early I
realized through doing this early on, that I could live
in one world, which is the world the university itself,
(18:05):
but create a different world within that same community. And
then coupled with that, I had the opportunity to pledge
Alpha pay Alpha fraternity incorporated at the University of South Florida,
which because the University of South Florida's chapter over there
was a Metro chapter so as long as you were
a college kid and you had the grades, you could
pledge at their school. So I had created me an
(18:28):
extended family. So my college life experience not only encompassed
what I experienced as an undergrad University of Tampa, but
as a fraternity member at the University of South Florida.
And it was assassinated because during that time I found
ways to bring them over to my campus to do
various activities. And I was able to go over to
(18:50):
the other school and bring my fellow students with me
for activities that they had over there as well. And
it went a long way towards me building a community
for myself and building a community that I could matriculate
in despite my circumstances. Now, I want people to understand
(19:14):
when I say this, despite some of these weird experiences
that I had at the University of Tampa. I've often
told people best three and a half years of my life,
and people are like, wow, you graduated early. I said, now,
that first semester was horrible, but the next three and
a half years were wonderful. You know, I met my
best friend there. He and I best friends even to
(19:35):
this day. A couple of good friends who have you know,
I'm god parents who have a couple of them, their
childs and so forth to this day. I mean my
experience there was life altering. I met people from different
walks and backgrounds that I had never experienced. It was
a small, intimate school that I embraced, that embraced me.
I grew into being a better leader through my experiences there.
(19:59):
But don't get me wrong, it was not without its challenges.
I still remember being called militant because I pledged the
Black fraternity, and I'm like, how does that make me militant?
But I back then I didn't understand that. But today
I'm not necessarily saying I fully understand it. But I
can see where they're coming from. I don't agree, but
I can see where they may feel a certain way.
(20:21):
But why am I sharing this? And why is this
important for you to know? As you are as I'm
sharing this, lesson what you're going for. Well, it's important
because you have to understand, especially if you're a student
of color. You have kids who are students of color
(20:42):
who are finding themselves on predominantly wide institutions. This is
the world there in they have to balance how do
they keep their own culture and find safe spaces for
them to matriculate, while at the same time balancing the
fact that they may be operating in a space that
was not intent, was not instinctively designed with them in mind.
(21:03):
And one of the things I often get upset with
people is that there's this natural inclination to say, oh,
we should all just assemble. No, we should not assimilate.
We should be able to explore each other's cultures and
enjoy each other's cultures. Sometimes it's not always a two
way street. So when students are finding themselves in this space,
I would probably tell them this is something that I
(21:25):
wish somebody would have told me. Build your own world
and let the rest of the world around you adapt
to you, not the other way around. All right, everyone,
thanks for tuning in. As always, make sure you like, subscribe,
or comment and follow. I appreciate you tuning in, and
as always, my question for you is are you ready
(21:45):
for the Anthony Reeves experience? Take care
And in the good evening everyone and Tony Tony Reeves
to read Tony red by following the news and any
wat shape them or no sortage of things to talk about.
What will this is a reality. We simply have to
(00:22):
let me read, let me read. The go ahead and
kids started, Hey, every want Hey, welcome, Welcome, welcome, Welcome,
as always, I appreciate you. This is Tony Reeves. Let's
just go ahead, get this thing started. I want to
talk to you about the perception of college and then
(00:45):
the real world experience of college. You know, for a
lot of us, when we're preparing future generations and kids
and talking to them about going to college, if they
haven't had a chance to visit the school and really
do a deep dive into the school itself, well it's
very easy to have this perception about what the experience
is going to be like. Now, let's just be clear.
(01:06):
Most kids when they're coming out of high school really
have no clue what college is going to be like.
So the idea that you know, they go and go
on a few tours and talk to the people there,
is going to give them this full breadth of experience
or knowledge about what they're going to experience. Yeah, that's
all well and good, but the reality is that that's
the best case scenario then for the vast majority of
(01:29):
kids who never even take that opportunity or have the
opportunity to visit the campus. And so what ends up
happening is that you have a perceived reality and then
the actual reality. And I can tell you that that's
magnified even more so when you are moving from one
culture into another. So I want to talk to you
(01:50):
about what it means, you know, what it meant, especially
for me as a member of Generation X, a black
member of a Generation X who found himself as a
black student coming from a predominantly black environment and going
and attending a school that was ninety five percent white.
And more importantly, I want you to understand why this
(02:12):
conversation is important today as we are finding kind of
this reshaping in terms of the educational environment. The overturning
of not really the overturning of Brownie Board as much
as the Students for Fair Admission has kind of indicated that,
you know, giving preferential treatments for race for purposes of
(02:33):
school and mystery and so is consider unconstitutional and what
that means for the landscape of students who find themselves
coming from different cultures and moving into a space already
knowing that they're going if they're going to a place
that is predominantly white, what that man actually mean for them?
And more importantly, how what was my experience? So let's
go ahead and jump to it now. For me, it's
(02:57):
kind of an interesting phenomena because I grew up, I graduate,
graduated in high school in nineteen eighty seven. So let's
kind of pause for the people who've never been in
that generation to understand what that landscape looked like. For me.
I am the child of the Civil Rights Movement. You know,
my mom came out of that era of the Civil
(03:18):
Rights Movement, all of her brothers and so forth like that.
But you know where their experience was focused on going
to historically black college and universities, with the Civil Rights Act,
the Voter's Rights Act, Fairhousing Act, desegregation of schools, and
just kind of just push towards and encouraging kids of
color to go wherever they wanted to go. That was
(03:41):
my reality. But the reality is is that I didn't
visit any college. So a lot of my perception of
the university life was really shaped by a few things. Now,
I would say school Days is one of them. School
Days came out in nineteen eighty eight. I was halfway
through my freshman year at that time, but probably the
biggest one probably be A Different World. And the reason
(04:04):
why A Different World and I'll say School Days was
really powerful is that it gave me the impression of
what it was in terms of the black college experience,
whether you know it or not, if you attended an HBCU.
And I'm going to tell you this full disclosure, I
didn't go to an HBCU, but there was an HPCU
(04:26):
in my hometown, University of Arksas Pine Bluff, and I
had several family members who attended. When I see or
when I watched a show like A Different World or
even School Days, there is this enriched nurturing environment in
terms of what it means to attend one of these institutions.
(04:48):
And so you would think, oh, man, you know with
family members and one in your hometown. And even with
these representations that for the first time we're seeing because
keep in mind, School Days and Different World was probably
the very first representation of what it was like to
go to college. For persons of color. Now, don't get
(05:08):
me wrong, there's references in pop culture here and there,
but in terms of centering black students and media or
in the arts and so forth, these were probably our
two bedrock movies. You know, We've had countless ones afterwards
that kind of touched on it, but these two really
set the tone in terms of showing kids who were
(05:31):
thinking about college what college life was like. So this
gave not only a full throated opportunity for kids who
were trying to go to college to see what college
would look like, but it definitely was a great place
to showcase what the environment was at historically black colleges universities.
So when you have all those things, you would think
to yourself, okay, with that backdraw, what made you not
(05:56):
want to go in that direction for somebody like me? No,
for me, I've often told people that I went to
the University of Tampa, which is malma mater, for the
wrong reason, And he said, what do you mean by
the wrong reason? And no, it's nothing like saying, well,
you know, I black schools weren't going to prepare me.
(06:16):
Oh no, no, you know, you know I need to
go to a school like that No, I went to
the University of Tampa because I was trying to impress
a teacher, just that simple my JRTC instructor. Why guy
figured out I throw that little extra caveat out there.
Who I felt that he should have given me greater
(06:37):
reverence than he did. I had, you know in my mind.
You know, he was someone which he didn't know at
the time, that I gave great degree of reverence to
in part because he was he had served as an officer,
he was a major in the Air Force. He was
you know, what I looked at him was not necessarily
(07:00):
extension of my family members, but recognizing that he served
in relation to the fact that all the men in
my family who I looked up to, because almost all
my uncles was the exception of one served and my
grandfather served. So earning his respect was something that was
very important to me, and I didn't think I necessarily did.
And so it was funny because he was regularly promoting
(07:22):
this school to students in different some of my fellow cadets,
but he wasn't doing it for me, Like he was
not encouraging me to pursue this school as an option.
I couldn't understand why because in my mind, and this
is just kind of the way I looked at it.
You know, I'm looking at my academic background. I'm thinking, Okay,
(07:44):
the kids that he's talking to don't have the same
acad acumen that I do, or the kids that he's
talking to don't have the background that I do. So
I'm sitting here feeling some kind of way by the
fact that he is putting all of his attention and
encourage them. Now, let's be clear about something. He might
have done that because he probably thought I didn't care
(08:05):
about his opinions. He might have done that because he
thought I had other options, because I did have a
stang attitude back in those days, so I could tell
you that for sure. And sometimes I wasn't always approachable
about certain things. So I could see from his standpoint,
not saying that he had one, because I've never talked
to him about this, but from my standpoint, I could
not understand why he wouldn't, you know, why he wouldn't
(08:31):
push me to go to this thing. So I put
all my eggs in one basket, and let me tell you, listen,
I put all of my eggs in one basket to
go to their school. Now, keep in mind the vast
majority of my family members attended HBCUs and I had
(08:51):
two uncles who you know. I had one one uncle
graduate from Universe Farkstaw, Pine Bluff. My mother graduated from
University of Arksas Pine Bluff after starting at Tuskegee. I
had a cousin of mine that was at more House.
My uncle had went to Howard and Maharry. You know,
my grandmother had went to school at the University of
Arkansas Pine Bluff. So I had a deep connection. And
even my mentors had went to University Arkansas Pine Bluff.
(09:12):
So I had a lot of people who had the
ability to guide me and provide insight. I wasn't listening
to them. I'm gonna go to the University of Tampa.
So here I go, and I go down there, and
let me be the first to tell you. I didn't
visit the school, didn't visit the campus. And I went
there and in one phrase, I was not ready. Now,
(09:37):
for those of you who are sitting here going dang man,
they just beat you at the door. No, no, no,
no no. When I said I wasn't ready, I didn't
know what to expect. The only thing I knew about
the University of Tampa is from what I heard, you know,
second hand, from my RTC instructor talking to other cadets,
and the brochure I got from the school. It didn't
(10:01):
have any of the things that I had normally been
used to. There was no football program, which is I'm
big about sporting football. They didn't have a track program.
They had a cross country didn't recognize what that was,
but I like track didn't have that. It's prominent sports
were soccer, baseball, and basketball. The school. You know, I
came from a town that was seventy six percent black,
(10:23):
went to this school which was ninety five percent white.
I was completely unprepared for what this world was going
to look like. So now here I am on this
small campus and the school is probably somewhere about fifteen
to two, somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand students.
It wasn't even so much about going there and realizing
(10:48):
that I was in a culture that was ninety five
percent white. It was also a lot of the little
things that made me feel isolated. And you would say, well,
what do you mean by isolated, Well, you know, I
had a few things that happen. I can still remember,
literally the first couple of weeks at the university, one
of the exercises they had with us, when we were
(11:10):
on our floor, the resident advisor asked everybody to tell
everybody out loud the schools they had the opportunity to
attend and then indicate why they chose this school. Of course,
everybody talking about all these schools, and when they come
to me, all the schools I was listing were HBCUs
and this was the only one that wasn't an HBCU.
(11:30):
And I can still remember, still remember this young lady
turning to me saying, white, young lady, it's a good
thing you didn't go to an HBCU, because that's not
the real world. I didn't know what to do with
that information. I'm like, what do you do with that?
And you know, I'm eighteen years old, you know, fifty
(11:53):
six year old me would have had a much different response.
But I didn't know what to do to do with
that information because in my world, all the people that
I looked up to went to HBCUs. From my world,
my mentor went to an HBCU. In my world, my mother's,
my uncle, my uncles, the people who shaped my life
(12:15):
went to HBCUs So to imply that this school, these schools,
were not the real world. I didn't understand what that meant,
and I didn't know how to respond to it either.
And then it was another thing that it was interesting
because I'm sitting here and I can still remember going
(12:37):
around campus and I joked about this to somebody. I said,
every year at the University of Tampa, I got pulled
over by the police at least once. University of police
pulled me over every year. By the time I was
a senior. They knew me by my name. And you know,
it's easy because you know, there's a way to be
self defeating and say, oh, you know. Part of it
(12:58):
is because the way I was just no, no, no,
when I walked around campus and I was minding my
own business the number of times and I'm not saying
they didn't pull anybody else. I just know I never
saw them pulling anybody else over. I got pulled over
all the time, so much so that by the time
I was li sing year and they pulled me over,
they were like, oh, hey, Tony, And I'm thinking, I
(13:19):
don't know if I should be proud that they recognized
as I'm a student, or offended that it took them
four years to get to this point because they should
have been able to notice the first time they pulled
me around, and then even getting the opportunity to find
my safe spaces was a wild phenomenon because for me,
I was looking for communities of people to bond with,
(13:42):
and for me, bonding with those people typically involved connecting
with people who look like me. And I can still remember,
still remember having this one student pulled me to the
side and look at me and say, hey, why are
you you know, why are you guys? And when he
says you guys, as you're talking about students of colors
segregating yourself now again, wasn't sophisticated back in the day,
(14:07):
because in my mind now I'm like, well, first of all,
we can't segregate ourselves. That's something that an institution has
to do to separate us by force. We are choosing
to assemble with each other, and of course it's a constitution.
We can assemble freedom of assembling, no problem there, But
for this particular portion purposes in school, we are choosing
to assemble with people who are have similar interests from
(14:32):
similar backgrounds with you and creating a safe space for
us to be able to communicate culturally and engage culturally.
But the more powerful thing is one, if you don't
recognize that's what we're doing, that's bad on you. But two,
why must we not a symbol as opposed to you
(14:55):
coming over to assemble with us? Again, didn't even think
about it from that light because in my mind I
didn't realize that this was going on so here. Literally
within the first two years, first few years, I had
somebody questioning. I have people literally who are questioning me
to say, oh, you know you went you know, we
(15:16):
needed to ask why are you assembling with other people,
or they're basically coming at me and telling me that, oh,
I made the right move going to basically going to
a white school. All of these experiences underscore to me
that I wasn't sure if I was in the right place,
and a lot of this happened, and sadly enough, almost
(15:36):
everything I just described, with the exception of me getting
pulled over every year, everything happened within the first couple
of months of getting there. So I tried to balance
this out and so what I ended up doing, because
you know, the easy thing you could say is well,
just leave. If you don't like where you're at, just leave.
(15:58):
And for some reason, I liked the school and I
decided to do something a little different. I decided to
build my own culture. And what do you mean by building?
And let's just be clear, if you're if you are
a minority student on a predominantly if you're a black,
especially a black student on a predominantly white campus, you
(16:19):
know the importance of building your own culture. And usually
building your own culture usually encompasses organizations that tend to
focus on students like you, like for us, it was
the Association of Minority Collegians, which is what I was
a part of, and then the International Student Organization, So
we were the two premier organizations for students of color.
(16:41):
We did not wait for the university to create a
culture for us. So what we did is we found
ways to create things for us. Like the running joke
that I used to tell people when I was coming
up is that I'd gone to plenty of parties at
the University of Tampa and the various white fraternities and
(17:01):
sororities and so forth like that. Invariably, none of these
parties ever felt like they had me and mine. The
music was never music that I would normally listen to.
More importantly, music I didn't feel like I could dance
comfortably too. So we started doing little things like we
put on an event called the Studio where we would play.
We basically pick a room at the basement in one
(17:23):
of the dorms and so forth, break out the DJ
booths and boom, have some music, and that would be
our thing. The other thing was we did talent shows.
We did something that was called the Apollo Night, which
became an annual thing for us to showcase skills and
do something again that was culturally focused on us. And
(17:44):
I will tell you during that time, I found my
voice and I found my comfort because listen and the
reality is is that I realized, and really early I
realized through doing this early on, that I could live
in one world, which is the world the university itself,
(18:05):
but create a different world within that same community. And
then coupled with that, I had the opportunity to pledge
Alpha pay Alpha fraternity incorporated at the University of South Florida,
which because the University of South Florida's chapter over there
was a Metro chapter so as long as you were
a college kid and you had the grades, you could
pledge at their school. So I had created me an
(18:28):
extended family. So my college life experience not only encompassed
what I experienced as an undergrad University of Tampa, but
as a fraternity member at the University of South Florida.
And it was assassinated because during that time I found
ways to bring them over to my campus to do
various activities. And I was able to go over to
(18:50):
the other school and bring my fellow students with me
for activities that they had over there as well. And
it went a long way towards me building a community
for myself and building a community that I could matriculate
in despite my circumstances. Now, I want people to understand
(19:14):
when I say this, despite some of these weird experiences
that I had at the University of Tampa. I've often
told people best three and a half years of my life,
and people are like, wow, you graduated early. I said, now,
that first semester was horrible, but the next three and
a half years were wonderful. You know, I met my
best friend there. He and I best friends even to
(19:35):
this day. A couple of good friends who have you know,
I'm god parents who have a couple of them, their
childs and so forth to this day. I mean my
experience there was life altering. I met people from different
walks and backgrounds that I had never experienced. It was
a small, intimate school that I embraced, that embraced me.
I grew into being a better leader through my experiences there.
(19:59):
But don't get me wrong, it was not without its challenges.
I still remember being called militant because I pledged the
Black fraternity, and I'm like, how does that make me militant?
But I back then I didn't understand that. But today
I'm not necessarily saying I fully understand it. But I
can see where they're coming from. I don't agree, but
I can see where they may feel a certain way.
(20:21):
But why am I sharing this? And why is this
important for you to know? As you are as I'm
sharing this, lesson what you're going for. Well, it's important
because you have to understand, especially if you're a student
of color. You have kids who are students of color
(20:42):
who are finding themselves on predominantly wide institutions. This is
the world there in they have to balance how do
they keep their own culture and find safe spaces for
them to matriculate, while at the same time balancing the
fact that they may be operating in a space that
was not intent, was not instinctively designed with them in mind.
(21:03):
And one of the things I often get upset with
people is that there's this natural inclination to say, oh,
we should all just assemble. No, we should not assimilate.
We should be able to explore each other's cultures and
enjoy each other's cultures. Sometimes it's not always a two
way street. So when students are finding themselves in this space,
I would probably tell them this is something that I
(21:25):
wish somebody would have told me. Build your own world
and let the rest of the world around you adapt
to you, not the other way around. All right, everyone,
thanks for tuning in. As always, make sure you like, subscribe,
or comment and follow. I appreciate you tuning in, and
as always, my question for you is are you ready
(21:45):
for the Anthony Reeves experience? Take care
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