LAUSR

It was my last semester of graduate school and I had survived the deathly verdicts of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, and many other unarmed Black men living in the United States, who died at the hands of police over the course of 2 years. I use the term survive to emphasize the ignorance I experienced in the institution of higher education that I was attending. Many may call my behavior as “flying under the radar,” but I simply refer to it as “survival of the fittest.” The rage I felt and grief I experienced, due to the loss of my brothers to senseless violence and policies based on melanin counts, went unspoken. My deep sensitivity to a system that works to protect the majority population, while perpetually challenging “the other,” never seemed to hold the same importance as the topic of the day on the syllabus, even within a present context of serial killings by police of unarmed Black men. My distress and fury had become my little secret. Whenever, my peers said something offensive, I never reacted. When my professors deducted points off pop quizzes with “constructive criticism” such as, “You didn’t answer the question fully,” without consideration that I may not have fully understood the questions due to a cultural barrier; I never reacted. One of my degree qualifications was to take two group work courses: General and Substance Abuse focused. Both courses required students to participate in assigned groups picked by the professor. In my first group work course, the professor used a computer to randomly place students in two separate groups. One group was made up of all heterosexual White