The Afro American Experience: Oct 7

This week’s column continues from a talk with student Justin Aderhold that ran Sept. 23. This column is for members of the African American student community to talk about whatever they want to talk about.

Daily Lobo: So tell me about medical school.

Justin Aderhold: Medical school is interesting because I’m starting to run into my own little fears of
being black. Like, am I good enough? And I let a lot of people who are involved in the medical school look at my application and look at everything I’ve done and they’re like, “Man, you’re going to get in.” I don’t feel that way. I feel scared. I feel inadequate. I don’t know. Part of it’s me.

DL: Well, you should go if you have a calling to heal people, I guess.
JA: Right, but the thing is I don’t feel confident. And to me, that’s what racism sort of does. It breaks down your confidence. And out here, that’s how I sort of feel. I don’t feel like black
people are confident. … Looking into racism as a black person is like looking into sexism for being a woman. There are two sets of rules. You guys live together. We live together. But we’re all pretty sure there are two sets of rules — sets of rules for a man, sets of rules for a woman. But the man doesn’t realize how bad the woman has it. Or if she has it bad at all. Because he’s not a woman, he doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know.

DL: How was academia back East?
JA: When I lived in West
Virginia, I was in this class and my teacher was like, “I think Justin is gifted.” So I took the test, and I had a genius-level IQ in the fourth grade.

DL: Congratulations.
JA: Right. The coolest part ever, though, was every Thursday we got to go to an entirely different school. Me and three kids from my entire elementary school would get on this bus and go to this school and learn physics, chemistry, architecture. … I went to the really smart school in an entirely white neighborhood. So when I went back to the black neighborhood, my gifted program wasn’t as extensive because of the funding.
So when I come out here, there’s a set amount of money for programs, and it always seems the non-black programs have more money than the black programs. If you walk into the African American Student Services now, there are computers in there that don’t work, that don’t read Acrobat. You can’t pull up a PDF file. Everything is in PDF! They don’t have printers. I mean, they have printers, but sometimes the printers are broken. You know? But the other centers, they have their own problems, too.

DL: Yeah, well, at the Daily Lobo, our printer is always broken. We can’t print anything. Our system crashes all the time. We have problems, too.
JA: It’s one of those things where you’re like, “Is it racism or is it just the way it is?” And that might be just the way it is. But in my mind, it’s racism.

DL: Because that’s what you’re used to.
JA: That’s what you’re used to.

DL: The differences are cloudy.
JA: And the reason that it’s cloudy is because you don’t have the entire community campus looking at you as a viable human being. And what I mean is when you’re black anywhere, but especially on UNM’s campus, it’s like you have a strike against you. Before you even did anything, you have a strike against you, because you’re black. … It’s like you have to try hard to make people comfortable around you. … When you have the entire culture teaching, media included, teaching you that you’re inferior, or not to like black people, or black people are rough around the edges, and they are not refined, it makes a very bad stereotype for everybody, because we are all in this together. We are all Americans. … So if everybody thinks black people are inferior, then the kids are going to come to campus and think black people are inferior. And it works vice versa, because black people think that they’re inferior and have been brain-washed by the media into kind of thinking white people are superior.

DL: See, I’m surprised to hear that, because I always thought that black people thought everyone was stupid for saying that. I just had this idea that you’d be like, “Why would you think I’m inferior? You’re an idiot for thinking that.” But I guess you are affected by it.

JA: Everybody’s affected by it. It affects you just as much as it affects me. You don’t know that I’m going through a struggle. And I’m not confident enough to tell you that there’s a struggle. … If you go to a black campus where there isn’t any racism, and there isn’t any threat of being looked down upon and you can focus on your school and everyone is united, well, they have 80 and 90 percent graduation rates.
Like, there’s a school that I got accepted into that I didn’t go to when I came out here. It’s called Morehouse College. Morehouse has a higher graduation rate than Harvard.