Personal Narrative: Field Experience

As I sat in the boiling hot sun, the heat that had overwhelmed me throughout the day surpassed. I was engulfed by Lu Paul, a native Hawaiian advocate who was telling me the story of how Native Hawaiians loss their rights. “How did my people become a minority in their own land?” he asked me inquisitively. I found myself making many connections with this man’s story and my own. As he answered my questions about inequality in his community, he began to speak of many things that I had witnessed in my life, that I thought only my own culture experienced. “My people need to fight for equal education, language rights, and employment”, he stated firmly. It was in this moment I began to broaden my perspective of inequality and minority rights. This along with the many other field experiences I had during my semester abroad, help shape my desire to attend law school and work both nationally and abroad in civil and human rights.

In the fall semester of my second year of college, I received the HBCU Scholarship to attend the Semester at Sea program. For five months, I participated

in UVA courses aboard a ship while traveling throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. While I never spent more than twelve days in a single county, I gained a far-reaching global education through intensive study and meaningful field programs. In my Minorities and Indigenous Groups International Law class, for example, we dug deep into issues surrounding these populations in Hawaii, China, Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, South Africa, and Morocco.
My field programs in Morocco, China, Myanmar, and South Africa provided opportunities for me to interact meaningfully with members of the country’s indigenous and minority populations.

I empathized deeply with these groups and gained a broader perspective on global struggles with inequality. When I returned to my home university, my mentor and professor, Dr. Hopkins, encouraged me to explore the issues I had learned about abroad in greater depth. Before I left to study abroad, I had developed a questionnaire to assess the perceptions of inequality in each country I visited. Now that I have returned to my university, I have begun mining my data to answer four primary questions: To what extent are people conscious of inequalities? To what do people attribute inequality? To what extent does inequality affect the quality of life in a given country? Does skin tone/color correlate to inequality

globally?
My experience with Semester at Sea provided a global lens through which to consider issues I have been intimately aware of my entire life. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I excelled in the most challenging academic classes offered by my school. However, despite my achievements, I perceived myself as intellectually inferior to many of my classmates. Too many of the people I loved and admired in my community felt the same way about themselves. I was constantly bombarded with dispiriting statistics about people who shared my skin color and socioeconomic circumstances. Statistics told me that African Americans had the weakest performance on standardized tests and lowest high school graduation rates. Statistics also told me that African Americans had the highest rates of incarceration and HIV-infection. Why, I often asked myself, were people of color cursed?
My lament transformed to a mission when I enrolled in local college courses through a dual credit advanced placement program as a high school junior and senior. In Psychology, Criminal Justice, and English Literature classes I received a heart-wrenching, but clarifying education in the historic and socioeconomic inequalities that plagued not only my own community, but also the entire nation. Through scholarship and research on my own, I began to identify the causes of the statistics that had once weighed so heavily on me. I learned that Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students and are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled.
As I began to understand the confidence barriers that I had faced growing up, I developed a commitment to solving the issues that plagued communities like mine. While going through this learning process, I was invited to Campus Connections, a group founded by community leader Mr. Baucom to encourage students from underrepresented racial groups to attend college. Mr. Baucom helped us gain confidence by introducing us to minority students who had attended from the lowest ranking elementary and high school systems in the country, but had since gone on to pursue prestigious scholastic achievements. Like many of the other students in Campus Connections my family was experiencing extreme financial difficulties. Due to my father becoming unemployed due to illness, my senior year of high school my family came very close to losing our home. During these financial and medical difficulties, Mr. Baucom encouraged me to keep pressing forward and focus on my academics. By the end of my senior year I received a full ride scholarship to Virginia State University, and several outside scholarships. One person believing in me and encouraging me to achieve my full potential transformed my life.
At VSU, I finally stopped running from the threat of failure that haunted my family and hometown. Instead, I began chasing after its root causes. During my freshman year, a professor invited me to work in the Psychology Department’s Minority Research Lab. Working in a research lab at a HBCU allowed me to do specific research topics on underrepresented communities that were often overlooked in research labs. In 2012, in response to a sudden increase in HIV rates among African Americans age 50 and older, I joined a research team to assess the HIV knowledge in African American population over age 50 in the Petersburg and Richmond areas of Virginia. Later that year, my research partner and I presented our findings at the SEPA conference in Atlanta, as well at the VSU poster competition. My research not only highlighted opportunities to increase awareness of HIV, but also provided an opportunity for me to become involved with the predominately African American and low-income community of Petersburg, VA. As I participated in voter registration and other outreach efforts, I was struck by the similarities to my hometown of Rock Hill, South Carolina.
My senior year of college I decided that I wanted to expand my experience with community development through a fellowship program. In June I was accepted into the Literacy Fellowship program where I currently teach high school equivalency course to adults aiming to earn a high school diploma at a back to work program in Brooklyn, New York. In this current fellowship I am gaining a deep understanding of how broken policies affect individuals living in poverty and it has inspired to make this my focus in law school.
There is much work to be done in the United States and abroad to promote human and civil rights. My ultimate goal is to pursue a law degree at UC Berkeley so that I may address these issues through legislation and advocacy. Working in my current Literacy Fellowship and studying abroad last year exposed me to the global and national reach of issues of inequality. Following college, I hope to deepen my understanding in preparation for a life of improving living conditions and increasing opportunities for people of all skin colors and income levels. The Graduate Diversity Program scholarship would allow me to do so at a top law school without the burden of worrying about financial issues. If awarded this scholarship I would not only be grateful, I would be determined to be a diligent students focused on using the law to change policies that affect people living in poverty throughout our nation and world.