Olin Is Racist

I came to Olin so excited to learn and innovate. I had high hopes of becoming a great engineer, making great friends, and doing important research with kind professors. Overall, I have been satisfied with my classes and this community. I have great and understanding professors and strong friendships. I am learning in a way that finally fits me, and for once I don’t feel out of place. But I am not okay and not happy. I have been holding this in for a while to avoid causing trouble, but I won’t be silent anymore. 

Once, when I first got to Olin, I was in the library reviewing some course material. As I was studying, an upperclassman who I had never met approached me and stood next to my seat, looking at me very intently. I greeted them and asked if I could help them with anything. They responded curtly, “People like you don’t belong here.” 

I was shaken and said the first logical thing to come to mind: “If you mean here at Olin, I am here to become an engineer.”

The upperclassman smirked, then remarked before walking away, “People like you don’t seem like they would be good engineers.”

For a second, I was confused by what they meant by “people like me”. Women? Did they think I was a BOW student? Why me over anybody else in the library?  

I then took a good look around and realized what that upperclassman meant. I was the only black student in the library. I was the only black woman in the library. 

What the upperclassman meant was: Black women shouldn’t be engineers and don’t belong at Olin. 

That hurt me more than I could ever express in words. After that interaction, I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Someone felt so strongly that I didn’t belong at Olin that they went out of their way to tell me, just so I would know my place. And no one else in the library piped up to defend me, came to comfort me, or even shot me a sympathetic look. Most even turned away. 

To some, this might not seem like a big deal, but it was. I am no stranger to racism and sexism in the STEM world: I was bullied out of coding camp at age 10 by a group of boys who insisted that girls are “too sissy to handle computers.” In 7th grade, a teacher had students pass around my perfect score test while announcing “if someone like [my name] can get a perfect score, then anyone can succeed in my class”. When I got a spot in AP Computer Science in 11th grade, some boys at my school started an online campaign against me, saying that the “diversity spot was taking away seats from guys who actually deserved it”. 

I came to Olin because I hoped that a STEM school run by an esteemed black female engineer would be better, and would be an inclusive and uplifting environment. Yet someone felt so much hate at the idea of a black woman being at Olin and becoming an engineer that they had to tell me that the community I worked so hard to become a part of didn’t fully accept me and never would. That broke my heart because my dream, my safe space, my community, were now gone. Despite this, I will stay in a space that is set against me and I can’t change it alone. 

Despite my crushing disappointment, I pushed my doubts from that interaction aside and let myself believe that it was just one person and the culture at Olin is different, but it’s not. 

In my time at Olin, I have experienced more microaggressions than I can count, been left out of team talks because my input “didn’t seem necessary”, and my mental health has been ignored by both students and staff alike. I even had another interaction with a different student who told me that I “don’t seem like the typical engineer”, and that maybe I should “reconsider if Olin is the right place for me”. This prejudiced culture has had horrible impacts on my mental and emotional health. I frequently had panic attacks last semester and developed an eating disorder from pent-up discomfort, rage, and insecurity that I felt nobody noticed. I have been close to fainting and no one ever asked me if I was okay. 

I never said anything because I knew that if I told others, no one would care. People don’t care if the black girl is unhappy, if she is in a bad place mentally, because to most, we are forgettable and negligible. That is just a historical fact. I have seen students see me have a panic attack and walk past me laughing about how I’m “so extra”. And when I have shared my story people zone out, say I “overreacted”, or pretend to care only to forget the next day. 

The first person who listened to me about the library incident was Gilda. She was the first person who noticed I was struggling and took the time to talk to me and share her own experiences, so I didn’t feel so alone. I was surprised by the fact that Gilda, an esteemed and respected engineer and certifiable genius, also faces racism at Olin and has also had many students come up to her and tell her “you don’t belong at Olin” and yet they are never able to explain why.  

It is crazy to me how someone as wonderfully kind as her receives so much hate from the student body, but I have noticed the ones most vocal with this hate are white.

Now, I am not trying to imply that all students at Olin are racist and discriminative. I think there are a few who are, but the majority of the student body and some of the staff have clear internal racism that they haven’t addressed. They need to examine their own bias or truly think about where some of their opinions come from. Everyone holds some prejudice—it’s a sad fact about our world. If you don’t work to dismantle your own prejudice, then you are part of the problem. 

Olin as a community is racist, and we can’t keep ignoring it.  

As a community, we value black students less than other students and lack open spaces where black students feel safe enough to express these feelings. This is what Olin is, and we need to change.

+ posts

Leave a Reply