There is a popular argument, resilient and scavenging as German cockroaches, that would suggest that I, in daring to love Mississippi and the University of Mississippi, daring to affirm myself and the other black lives that have the audacity to exist here, kicking and screaming when the student body and the administration act up with regard to these things, would have been better off at an HBCU, or a historically black college or university. That in choosing not to attend an HBCU, I am somehow betraying my blackness.
That in choosing to attend the University of Mississippi, I am deserving of the occupational hazard of the occasional “nigger” flung from the open window of a dorm, the symbolic lynching of a symbol of integration, the frustration of watching Klanspeople give their money to Associated Student Body senators so that the racist flag of the great state of Mississippi might flap like a buzzard over the heads of the students here on campus as they bite into the Christian warmth of their Chick-fil-A sandwiches.
It is absolutely true that HBCUs, in their undeniable impact on not only the black community but academia, come with a plethora of benefits — a marked lack of involvement of Klanspeople in student affairs being one of the most appealing ones. The Divine 9 is probably never an afterthought when you talk about Greek life on HBCU campuses. Probably, no one begs you to ignore that slavery existed on HBCU campuses, either.
But I, like many other 18-year-olds, self-centered and frantic about the future, followed my major, followed the money, followed my gut. For my decision, I’ve spent four years in the recuperative glow of Bryant Hall, basking in the brilliance and compassion of its professors and the words of the ancients. At the risk of spilling out its most tender parts for the wrong people to see, I showed this campus my soul. I have fought for change outside of my words, have demanded it with them, and have never been more in touch with all that is black and beautiful about me in my life.
How I got to be an editor of the Opinion section of The Daily Mississippian is that I hated it.
Before I worked here, this section of the paper, colored with lazy thought processes and even lazier language, couldn’t go a day without pissing me off. I would constantly take to social media in order to express my frustration with the writing here. But, instead of crying on Yik Yak, I went directly to the source and shoved my words off to the people there and requested that I be heard.
I was published, and then I was published again. I talked about my sex life and your sex life. I talked about racism, and friendship, and broken hearts, and the mistake of Miley Cyrus’s celebrity and the tragedy of Kanye West’s. I told the Daily Mississippian that white gay men didn’t know me like they thought they knew me, and then somehow the rest of the world found out, and it spoke back. I’ve talked about Mississippi and my well-deserved spot for myself I’ve carved at the University of Mississippi, both of which, despite all of their sins, I’ve grown to love ferociously, despite the many times I felt failed and betrayed by both. But I don’t regret these things. When I love something, I hold it accountable. And I deserve all of the love I offer at the altar of my pride back to replenish the flesh I scooped out of my heart to make it all possible. I came here, and I swam, and I gave it the gift of my time.
And like sands through the hourglass, this is the last time in your life you’ll read me in print in the opinion section of the Daily Mississippian.
My time at the University of Mississippi alone has been nothing short of tumultuous. I came to the University of Mississippi as a first-generation college student, a Barksdale Scholar, a National Achievement Scholar, fresher than you — and I leave it, title-free, official honor-free, definitely scholarship-free, and pummeled, and humbled, and altogether better for it. Here, I have extended my forearm with the veins bursting with plum blood to nourish this place, and I have let it stab me open and drink from me in order to make it better. And, despite my tears and the almost everlasting reaping — Oxford is the type of place where the frivolity of the Square and the students will find you in your darkest, least frivolous moments and tear you to pieces — I am glad that I let it have me.
Possessing me especially has been a long and strange tenure in the Student Media Center as the opinion editor of the Daily Mississippian. And despite all of the attempts to shut me up, I am glad that I complained.
I am glad that the pot was stirred in part by my clenched fist. I celebrate discourse, which laughs in the face of Southern exceptionalism that calls passive-aggressiveness kindness, that lauds meekness as appropriate, that has the potential, to shake the status quo at its corn-fed core.
I have finished my part. Sierra Mannie is done.
Follow her on Twitter at @SKEEerra.
