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Providing Opportunities

Student Success Region IV-E Region IV-E
January 21, 2015 Jacob Frankovich

Providing Opportunities

I stood in the DePaul University student center earlier this year with one of the most active multi-racial students I work with.  Together, a team of staff on our campus had been working with her and others to develop a new multi-racial student organization on campus.  We were getting ready to leave after a weekend jam-packed with research papers, documentary viewings, personal narratives, and countless conversations with staff, students, and faculty at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference.  Standing together, she smiled, and said, “This was one of the best weekends of my life.” 

Cynically, I thought to myself, “Really!?  One of the best?”  And yet, it shows the power of connection.  This was not one of the best weekends because of those three days.  It was one of the best weekends because of her previous 18 years of existence.  Countless questions from peers, verbal jibes from one side of the family or the other, and an internal, non-step quest trying to figure out who she herself is.  When all of that complexity is bottled up, the opportunities to pour out are few and far between.  The conference provided one such outlet.  I cannot help but see the students I work with in the beautifully insightful, deeply personal, and often frustration-filled stories provided for readers’ benefit in Mixed.

One of my closest friends and best colleagues always had a fabulous mantra for working with students:  “Students do not know what they do not know.”  How could they?  How could any of us?  I am immediately reminded of this quote as I ponder our collective work with multi-racial and multi-ethnic students on college and university campuses.  The University of Illinois, where I work, has not had a multi-racial student organization for several years.  The group apparently dissolved in the 2000s.  On the surface, it was not as if students were clamoring for such a group.  Yet when the opportunity was provided and when discussion spaces were created, students did come.  When trainings were held for staff’s benefit, they showed up too.  Not necessarily in great numbers, but with heavy burdens and emotional stories.  As a staff team (made up of both mono- and multi-racial individuals) we brought the speakers, we advertised the programs, and we educated ourselves on how best to make change.  Ultimately, we provided the opportunity.  Students may not have even known they were missing something.  If it doesn’t exist, what is there to miss?  They may not have known it, but it is clear now that they felt the void internally, and slowly but surely, we are working together to fill it. 

What opportunities can you provide on your campus?  What discussion space can you create?  What already existing program could have a multi-racial theme for the week or the month?  As we all scramble amidst a stampede of e-mails, programs, questions, and concerns, let’s strive to remember the impact of one weekend.  One conference.  One dialogue.  As Anise Vance proclaims in Mixed, people are not half of one thing and half of another.  How can we make our own efforts less fractioned and divided?  Our multi-racial students are whole people (and likely among the fastest growing on your campus).  Maybe we can relate to their experience, and maybe we can’t.  What we all can do, is provide an opportunity.  It may be one they didn’t even know they were wanting or needing. 

Blog by Jacob Frankovich, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign