Читать книгу Diversity and Inclusion Matters - Jason R. Thompson - Страница 10

I was born in Japan on a military base to an African American father and a Japanese mother. I have no memories of Japan because after I was born we soon moved to Hawaii. We were a family of six, and I am the youngest of four children. After five years in Hawaii, my dad was transferred to the Air Force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I lived in Wyoming until I was in my late 20s.

Growing up in Wyoming was difficult because there are few people with brown skin. My family did not have much money, partly because my parents did not make a lot of money and partly because my dad always made bad decisions with the money we did have. I struggled in school, yet somehow, despite my dyslexia, I graduated from the University of Wyoming with both a bachelor's and a master's degree.

Probably even more unlikely, as a graduate student, I became the first Person of Color to be the student body president at the University of Wyoming. The election process was full of tension and heavy with undertones of racism. On the first day I put up my posters, I received a phone call from someone threatening to beat me up. In addition, it seemed as if my campaign posters were being ripped down within an hour of my putting them up. On a daily basis, students would say to me, “You need to put posters up, or people are not going to know you are running for student body president.” What they did not know was I spent the first hour of every morning walking all over campus putting up posters only to have someone rip them down.

In what now seems like a scene from a story made for a movie, one of the two candidates I was running against wore a hat with the Confederate flag on it. To make the story even more outlandish, the advisor to the student government allowed the fraternity brothers of the incumbent student body president to count the votes for the primary election. The incumbent's fraternity brothers decided it was necessary to throw out ten votes, which meant that I came in ten votes behind the incumbent. Nonetheless, I still made it to the general election runoff against the incumbent.

As the general election drew nearer, things continued to become more contentious. I experienced threats of violence, and my campaign posters, which included a picture of my young son, were defaced with insults and put everywhere to make sure I saw them. The defaced posters were put on the door of the graduate student office I shared with other graduate students in the Sociology Department and on the door of the Multicultural Resource Center where I worked. My wife worked on campus at that time, and she, too, was threatened at work by students who supported the incumbent. The election became so charged with tension that the city of Laramie was asked to bring in their official election equipment, and the city employees conducted the voting process. This was the first and only time in the history of the University of Wyoming when a student election required the oversight of professional election staff and equipment.

In the end, the majority of students at the University of Wyoming saw the divide and crossed the bridge. I won by a landslide on a predominantly white campus with barely 100 Black students. My personal story is one of crossing bridges and overcoming obstacles.