Age: 20 | Hometown: Houston
Kelley Akhiemokhali wasn't sure what to expect from Duke. She didn't visit the University, so before freshman orientation she had no idea that students lived on two separate campuses or that the Chapel bells rang every day at five o'clock.
What she did expect was an end to the type of racial expectations that led some black students to designate other blacks as "white" for excelling academically in high school. After all, this was Duke-everyone had to be smart to get here. In college, she thought, academic achievement would be a shared value, not a racialized one.
So it seemed, until she attended a party at the beginning of her sophomore year. Another attendee guided two displaced students visiting from New Orleans through the party. The girl led the students to a group including Akhiemokhali and introduced them to everyone there-except Akhiemokhali-saying, "These are all the black students, or all the black students who hang out with other black students anyway."
To Akhiemokhali, the slight epitomized a phenomenon she'd perceived since her freshman year-"black students constantly attempting to prove their blackness."
"When we were in high school, we were the 'white' black people because we did well in school," she says. "These were the same people who knew what it was like to be considered not-black, and how it feels to have someone deny your own identity, and here you have them doing it on a different level."
She didn't tell anyone about the encounter for months. "But when I finally started to speak with people about what happened, they were like, 'What? That is not okay, you are not overreacting.'"
Akhiemokhali says she was stricken by just how many of her friends echoed her experiences."They'd say, 'Don't go and tell so-and-so what I said,' 'Let me shut the door before we start talking,'" she says.
Instead, Akhiemokhali kicked open the door to the tabooed topic by writing a guest column about her experience in The Chronicle.
"For reasons beyond my understanding, a small group of black students at Duke attempt to dictate what blackness represents for everyone," she wrote. "Not surprisingly, the woman who snubbed me at the party was an active participant in what is considered the black community."
She described a social system in which membership is defined by "maintaining a highly active social life and participating in certain cultural groups," or declaring affiliation by joining Facebook groups with names such as, "Black People Who Chill With Other Black People."
"The black community is only welcoming to those who want to participate in what a small but significant group myopically define as a community," she wrote.
Akhiemokhali knew that the column, featured prominently in The Chronicle's editorial pages, would draw attention.
"Right before I submitted I was really nervous because I thought there would be this big backlash, but the opposite happened.. Nobody really responded," she says.
Instead of critiquing her argument, the people who did react largely disapproved of the vehicle for her opinion; they suggested that The Chronicle may have been too public a forum for such a divisive topic.
"One administrator said to my face, 'Well, people can perceive it as you throwing rocks from the outside instead of working to change it from the inside,'" she says.
A formal response to the column from the editors of the Talking Drum, the Black Student Alliance's magazine, echoed the administrator's comments.
"While we disagree with her choosing The Chronicle as the medium through which to voice her opinions, the fact that she did so publicly. engenders open discussion," the editorial said.
Even after the Talking Drum editorial-which included an invitation for responses to the column at the bottom of the page-Akhiemokhali said most people remained silent. She and two fellow Baldwin Scholars organized a panel discussion of race and Duke social life with other Chronicle columnists.
Attendees still didn't broach the issue, suggesting that such a conversation should occur exclusively among members of the black community.
"This isn't a new problem, this problem has been around since before I got here, and nobody wants to address this issue. The panel proved that even more," Akhiemokhali says. "People think that if you criticize something, you're coming from a place of hate. If I didn't care, I wouldn't criticize."
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