The College Diaries: How a Budding Black Feminist Found Her Voice

By DeAsia Paige

The College Diaries: How a Budding Black Feminist Found Her Voice explores the intersection of race, gender and culture. In her first novel, author DeAsia Paige highlights the college experience of a young Black woman trying to understand the world around her, while studying at a pred

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636760902

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The College Diaries

The College Diaries

How a Budding Black Feminist Found Her Voice

DeAsia Paige

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 DeAsia Paige

All rights reserved.

The College Diaries

How a Budding Black Feminist Found Her Voice

ISBN

978-1-63676-538-9 Paperback

978-1-63676-089-6 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-090-2 Ebook

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Part 1

Chapter 1. Higher

Chapter 2. A Different World

Part 2

Chapter 3. New Rules

Chapter 4. Stuck

Part 3

Chapter 5. Weary

Part 4

Chapter 6. Power

Part 5

Chapter 7. Welcome to the Party

Part 6

Chapter 8. I’m Sorry

Chapter 9. Respect

Chapter 10. Remember to Breathe

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Author’s Note

I’ll never forget November 8, 2016. Not only was it the day I found out whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, but it was around the time when I started to get acclimated to my college campus. It was the first semester of my freshman year, and I met new friends and began attending Black Student Union meetings regularly. However, that particular day was the first time I would miss a Black Student Union event. They were having a watch party for the presidential election, and I decided not to go because I was too anxious about seeing the results. Instead, I went to the gym.

Fewer cars than usual were in the gym’s parking lot. CNN was the only channel on the televisions near the workout equipment. Before I entered, early projections had shown that Donald Trump would win. I immediately deleted the CNN app from my phone, put my purse in my locker, put my headphones in, and turned the music up to the maximum volume as I listened to my workout playlist. Other people in the gym seemed intensely focused on their workout for the day, so I figured I should do the same.

I figured the results would have a different outcome by the time I finished my workout. I was wrong.

Donald Trump was the president of the United States, and I was stunned. I met my boyfriend at the time on the bench outside of my residence hall. We stared at each other with blank expressions on our faces. We couldn’t believe what had just happened. As we sat there, college started to feel less of a dreamy environment and more of a space of uncertainty. Although we never said a word, I knew we were both thinking, What the fuck just happened? I suddenly wasn’t excited about college as much as I was before that day. Our futures just didn’t seem as bright.

On November 10, 2019, a little over three years later, I found out I was pregnant. It was the first semester of my senior year of college, and, similar to the way I felt when Trump was elected, I really couldn’t believe it. I was pregnant by someone I barely knew. Everything that was happening in my life at that time became less important, and I was forcing myself to grapple with the possibility of motherhood and raising a child in Trump’s America with a person I wasn’t in a relationship with. I thought about what other people would think of me, considering I got pregnant by someone I barely knew. I also thought about Black mothers in this country dying at a rate three times that of white mothers.¹ Three months prior, I had finished my dream internship in New York City, and I wondered how I’d be able to enter the job market as a single mother with a newborn baby.

The more I thought about the quandaries of the what ifs, the more I felt very uncertain about my future. Once more, it just didn’t seem as bright, and I didn’t like that idea. I ended up getting an abortion. It became one of the worst experiences of my life because I went through it alone. But the situation taught me so much about myself and my identity as a Black woman, and I think I’m a stronger person today because of it.

What happened on November 8, 2016, and November 10, 2019, are just two of the stories that defined my college experience while informing my perceptions on topics like power, patriarchy, and happiness. More importantly, those situations, and everything I’ve experienced in between, have helped me to grasp who I am as a Black woman in her early twenties. At the same time, I was also trying to understand the world around me, which has taught me to believe in myself more than I have in the past. I hope my experiences inspire other Black women to share their stories while encouraging them to love themselves more deeply in a society that constantly aims to decimate their existence.

Unfortunately, Black women are at the bottom of society’s totem pole in every facet because they lie at the intersection of being Black and being a woman—two marginalized demographics—and their experiences, especially those pertaining to younger generations of Black women, are often overlooked and dismissed. Black women deal with issues from unemployment rates to seeking adequate healthcare, which disproportionately impacts them in almost every facet of life.

Those circumstances have created stereotypical perceptions of how Black women should act. Society believes Black women are monolithic and are assumed to stay in the same box society created for them. However, Black women can be many things. They can be sex-positive while being successful in their careers. They can get good grades in school and still find time to party every weekend. They can have a desire for children and not want to be married.

I feel compelled to write this memoir because, through my experiences, I’ve learned that Black women deserve the space to exist outside of the patriarchal and racist margins society sets for them. Throughout my college career, I’ve recognized the power I have as a Black woman to choose a life that isn’t contingent upon the expectations of other people. Additionally, the lessons I learned from my experiences highlight various issues that are common for Black women to encounter. The overarching theme of survival is inherent in Black womanhood because survival is the essence of our existence. We face systemic violence, and simply existing can be a radical act. In an essay for The Atlantic, author Tamara Winfrey-Harris mentions the regular dismissal of the trials Black women face:

Officers, serving a so-called no-knock search warrant at her apartment after midnight, shot Breonna Taylor eight times as she lay in her own bed, after exchanging gunfire with her boyfriend, who thought someone was breaking in. Her death has provoked some outrage, but not at the level of Floyd’s. Though the Black Lives Matter movement was founded by three black women—Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza—police killings of black women and girls have failed to provoke much national emotion and outcry. Consider the names of so many women—Rekia Boyd, Atatiana Jefferson, Pamela Turner, Yvette Smith, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and others—whose stories seemed to dissolve from public consciousness like paper in the rain.²

This memoir is simply for the Black women who survived and whose stories remain neglected. More specifically, this memoir is for young Black women who’ve always questioned their likelihood to survive while in a college environment. The memoir covers abortion, sexual assault, and mental health from an intersectional lens. It uses the music of popular Black artists to better describe experiences Black women often face. This memoir is from the perspective of a young adult Black woman—a perspective that’s rarely heard—and I hope my story encourages young Black women to know they aren’t alone in their experiences.

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1 Elizabeth Chuck, The US finally has better maternal mortality data. Black mothers still fare the worst, NBCNews, January 30, 2020.

2 Tamara Winfrey-Harris, The Reckoning Will Be Incomplete Without Black Women and Girls, The Atlantic, June 14, 2020.

Part 1

Summer 2016 Semester

Chapter 1

Higher

The summer of 2016 marked the start of my college journey. High school was a closed chapter, and I was ready to get on with my life. I didn’t have a great high school experience, and I desperately needed a fresh start.

I wanted my college moment to be similar to what ANTI was for Rihanna. Although the album’s release was in January of 2016, I was still ruminating on the genius of ANTI, Rihanna’s eighth album, in the summer. Before the album’s release, Rihanna left her previous label Def Jam to sign with Roc Nation, making ANTI the first Rihanna album jointly released through Roc Nation and her own label, Westbury Road.³ After leaving Def Jam, Rihanna acquired the masters to all of her previous recordings.⁴ ANTI marked the first time Rihanna, who served as the album’s executive producer, seemed to have complete creative control over her work. Rihanna was quickly evolving into an artist who was free of someone else’s expectations, and, in doing so, she created a genre-bending record that was a delightful refrain from the homogeneous pop sound that started to define her artistry.

I wanted that kind of independence. I wanted to have complete creative control of my life, and college seemed like the perfect opportunity to achieve that.

It was early in the morning. My mom gave me that look again. Her piercing eyes and stoic demeanor made me know what she was about to request of me