What Black Women can learn from the Chennel Rowe incident.

There are many stories that tend to catch my eye. But this one especially catches my eye because of the explicit nature of the story all together. Chennel Rowe, was a black female Jamaican college student who shared a dorm room with Brianna Brochu, a white female freshman student. Both girls were attending the University of Hartford in conneticut. Earlier this month Chennel who goes by "Jazzy" began to post videos on social media detailing her mistreatment by her white roomate. First she stated that Brianna was acting rude to her for no reason. Then she began to develop pain in her throat (which turned out to be an infection.) Come to find out, her roomate Brianna had been doing all sorts of disgusting things with Chennel's personal belongings and was posting about it on her own social media accounts. She derisively referred to chenel as "Jamaican Barbie" and said she was glad she got her to leave the room. Her white friends seemed to be cheering her on in her mistreatment of her black roomate on social media as well. Which is extra chilling in this case, and proves that racism is still very much a prevalent part of American culture today and that we are not in a post racial society. 

What black women need to recognize, is that even though we now live in a so called integrated society now, with integrated schools, universities and public institutions viscious racism still and often DOES occur. What happened to this girl Jasmine was a tragedy. But I often wonder, what would have happened if she had went to an all blk university or school (an HBCU). Would she have had the same experience? Would her experience had been better? Perhaps she would have thrived more in an evironment with those with a similar cultural backgroud as her. Maybe in this environment she would not have had to worry about passive aggressive racist white girls who were jealous of her. 

Integration has taught blk people to seek security within white institutions. However what integration did not teach was that racism and hatred can still lurk within said institutions in the form of hateful individuals. Now you guys know I am a blk community first kind of guy. I think the blk community needs to look to it's own institutions first to suit it's needs before looking elsewhere. I hate to say it, but I don't think this doctrine was followed in the case of this girl Jazzy Rowe. I think she seeked out a racist institution from the get go thinking it would get her ahead in life and got more that what she bargained for. This is a tragedy and I don't want to see stuff like this happen again but never the less it is a learning moment. I think we in the blk community need to ask ourselves if our institutions in our community are on our priority list when it comes to fulfiling our needs, and if not I think serious reconsideration of priorities needs to occur.