The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in West Michigan)
By: Ruth Terry
Tags: Religion, Equality, Black In The Midwest, Race, Culture

I chose to go to Calvin College, now Calvin University, because they had a reciprocal tuition waiver with the school where my dad had tenure and, unlike other Christian centers of higher learning, they let you smoke cigarettes on campus. As a result of these dubious criteria, I unwittingly ended up at the Christian Reformed Church’s flagship institution, despite never having heard of the denomination before.

Calvin, though not particularly highly ranked, had all the superiority that I now associate with the denomination and then some. There was even a joke on campus that went, “if you flunk out of Calvin, there’s always Hope,” referring to another Reformed college in nearby Holland, Michigan. This was a real possibility as Calvin’s relatively benign admissions requirements belied a challenging curriculum and rigorous grading system; religion professors allegedly never gave A’s.

At first, I found all the Dutchness interesting. My friends had long and sibilant surnames — Broersma, Hoolsema, Dykstra. The stroopwafel cookies and Dutch chocolates at the school bookstore were charmingly European. Friends of mine even participated in “ethnic” activities like “Tulip Time,” held every year in Holland, Michigan. I think a few even owned wooden shoes. My first semester was like the staycation version of a semester abroad.

But soon I realized that as much as I was exoticizing them, they were exoticizing me. Many students knew each other from feeder schools like Grand Rapids Christian High, Holland Christian, or Timothy Christian near Chicago. For them, arrival at Calvin was like — or literally was — an extended family reunion. I was not part of that family. Neither were the other Black students, who were mostly from Ghana — yep, there are Reformed churches there, too — and weirdly sequestered in the “diversity dorm” at the far end of campus.

I was going to parties and drinking heavily before classes even started. I dressed uniquely and provocatively and performed for the White male gaze. But no matter how much attention guys tantalized by my dark skin and textured hair gave me, they never asked me out. By senior year, most were in serious relationships with or engaged to Dutch girls. (And now, 20 years later, I imagine them as the pot-bellied heads of households with barely pronounceable, multisyllabic surnames like Schultze-Eldersveld.)

In fact, White men dominated my college experience. Most of my friends were White men. My two boyfriends were White. Nearly all of my professors were White men. White men, and Dutchmen, who Calvin’s curriculum prioritized, had written my textbooks and made all the art I studied for my art history degree.

There was no space for me at Calvin. I stood out but never felt seen. My mental health was poorly managed, and I exacerbated my symptoms by overusing alcohol and stimulant medications. I engaged in non-suicidal self injury, clinically abbreviated as “NSSI,” which left visible signs that I know at least one professor noticed — I saw his double-take when I raised my hand in class. Yet, except for Calvin’s lone Black instructor who reprimanded me for failing to represent! and a White bipolar professor who recognized my symptoms, all my professors acted oblivious to my struggles.

My grades were trash. Homeschooling, which my parents had chosen for religious and financial reasons, had left me with disadvantages. My science background was limited and I didn’t know strategies for getting partial credit on homework or maximizing test time. But even in classes where I should have excelled, I could never quite deliver what my professors were looking for.

A Spanish teacher downgraded me for writing “Nueva York,” where my mom’s family is from, instead of “New York” in a Spanish composition. Other students gave glib and banal presentations; I struggled to pull a D in Speech. Public speaking, which I had never done before, triggered my anxiety to the point that I self-medicated with three shots of peppermint Schnapps prior to my morning final. When I requested a recommendation to support an NYU grad school application, an art history professor cautioned me about setting my sights too high.