Some of the best years of my life were when I went to the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I felt like I had little to no
worries. I had heard a lot of people being categorizing by race, but I never
really experienced it firsthand. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
I was now recognized as a minority. One night I was riding my bike back to my
car that I parked of campus and on my way back to my dorm I was stopped by a
police officer. Another person of Caucasian ethnicity rode right in front of
the officer with no light on his bike, but instead of pulling him over the
officer pulled me over for not having a light. The officer gave me a warning
stating that I am required to ride with a light a night. I asked the officer
why he didn’t pull over the other person who rode right in front of his car. He
replied that he didn’t see him. I don’t believe that was the case because the
officer was driving and he went right across in front of him before he pulled
me over. This was my very first time experiencing racism. Later on that weekend
I was walking in the street because the sidewalk was full of drunk people. A lady
officer pulled up and commanded me to get out the street before she writes me a
J walking ticket. Out of all the people she passed in the street the officer
decides that she going to write me the only African American in the street a
ticket, but she gave everybody else warning. I was very upset and let the
officer have it in so many words. There were many other instances in which I
experienced racism on the campus. When walking around that first weekend there
were a couple of fraternity houses that made it known that we were not allowed
in their houses. I didn’t understand, but later it was explained that only
fraternity members were allowed in some of the houses. Since I wasn’t a member
of the fraternity I couldn’t go in. In my pre-calculus class second semester of
freshman year I had a professor who loved to make assumptions about the class.
On the first day of class he said “I know you think this class will be easy,
but knowing you, you will make the class hard for no apparent reason. I don’t
expect the class to receive many A’s as it is a difficult class.” The professor
put everyone’s academic skills into one category even though he didn’t know
anything about anybody in the class. If you wanted to see the African Americans
on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign one place you
should look is at the Illini Union (student center). I always seemed to find my
fellow African Americans at the back of the Illini Union on the stoop. In
between classes when I want to meet up with a couple of people I was sure I
would find a couple of them there. One thing that I always noticed was that any
time African Americans would sit on the stoop other ethnicity group wouldn’t
really sit in the same area and if they did they were distant from the African Americans.
Everyone segregated into different distinct areas of the Illini union.
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