Black Students and Educators Speak Out About Their Experience at UWM

While walking across campus her freshman year, Tanasia Shaw said she didn’t see a lot of students who looked like her and saw even fewer black professors on UWM’s campus. It was clear to her that UWM lacks black students and black academic faculty members.

After seeking out other black students and guidance at the Black Student Cultural Center, and becoming more involved with on campus, she is now president of the Black Student Union. After feeling isolated her freshman year, she is now determined to make her college experience, and other black student’s experience more welcoming.

“Events don’t seem catered to black students. And when there are events hosted for us, we get the bare minimum,” said Shaw.

According to the UWM Facts Database, African American students make up only 7% of the student body. The majority of African and African American academic staff teach African and African Diaspora Studies, where there are seven in total in that department.  

With few black students and faculty members at UWM, feelings of misrepresentation are apparent amongst the few students who attend. 

Dahkai Paasewe is a psychology major at UWM and will be graduating in May. He recalled that his experience at UWM his first two years were not as accepting and engaging as he hoped. 

“I felt alone, I felt isolated, I felt just completely different. I felt like a minority for sure,” Paasewe said.

When he brought it up to his non-black friends, they’d tell him it was just in his head. But Paasewe said when he mentioned it to other black students, they felt exactly the same way.    

Paasewe decided he didn’t want to feel isolated on campus anymore and joined the BSU. He said that he’s made so many new friends and feels a sense of family on campus now. He like other BSU student members, hang out at the Black Student Cultural Center where students tutor each other, talk about their experiences and are free to be themselves without judgement. 

The Black Student Cultural Center also had advisors, and student can go as they please to ask questions and bring their concerns to black UWM staff members. Faculty in the center play an important role in students’ lives because according to staff there, student may not have a safe haven to bring up campus concerns anywhere else. 

The lack of diversity in UWM advising staff has become a concern to the faculty in the Black Student Cultural Center. 

H. Victoria Pryor is the student services program manager at the Black Student Cultural Center and says that UWM needs to hire more African American professors and staff.

“UWM does a lot of lip service about diversity instead of taking action. There are African American staff members who left due to racial comments by other staff members and still haven’t been replaced, “said Pryor.

Pryor said an African American professor for the Lubar School of Business, ended his employment with UWM due to feeling discriminated against by other staff in Lubar. It seems that black professors go through the same challenges as students on campus. 

With few black educators, the ones that are available on campus wear many different hats in order to help as many students as they can. Derrick Langston is the perfect example. 

Langston is the multicultural student success coordinator at the Black Student Cultural Center. Langston specifically works with black, African and multiethnic first-year students. He currently has 145 first-year students assigned to him. Along with advising his students, he sits on five different university committees, and acts as a counselor, mentor, and so much more for any student who steps into his office. 

“We as educators, there are a lot of things we have to do that aren’t necessarily in our job description, but it’s what the students need though,” Langston said.

He said that if UWM isn’t going to hire more minority advising staff, the current staff need to have better training of understanding multicultural student’ needs. 

“I think there has to be more attention paid to multicultural understanding when it comes to administration,” Langston said. “I think when students of color are telling administrators that they’re having problems here, as far as their racial or ethnic identity, that needs to be heard and understood, and not written off as a student just complaining or just ‘playing the race card’.”