Throughout my career, many have considered me, a Black queer Ivy League graduate, as a beneficiary of unfair advantages. Racism has allowed them to ignore classism and nepotism elsewhere in college…
It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I began to notice the perceived privileges of other students on campus and my mind was blown. At Penn, there’s a wide swath of “legacy” students who get admitted every year. “Legacy” students are those who are the relatives of alumni, faculty, and staff at the university.
I was the first of my family to graduate from college, no one from my public high school had recently attended Penn before me. It was at this moment that it became clear to me that the obsession with my Blackness in this predominantly white institution was a guilty conscience of the most privileged people in the room. While so much of the suspicion was focused on “unfair advantages” being given to Black and brown students – wealthier, white, and/or more connected students were given a pass.
“If you are a poor girl from a small town, Penn took note of it,” I wrote at the time. “If you are a legacy from the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York, Penn remembered it. If you went to public school in a middle-class neighborhood, Penn did not forget you. And if you applied all the way from Hong Kong, Penn wanted you. At the end of the day, all of us come from diverse backgrounds and trying to fathom an ideal formula for admission would be impossible.
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