Student of change
David Blanding is active and successful at Boston University, and still he feels he always has something to prove
(Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)
‘This is my school. I’m a shareholder in this large corporation. I might as well do something meaningful with it.’ David Blanding (above), senior at Boston University
Fifth in a series of occasional articles about blacks and Latinos living in metro Boston
David Blanding, cellphone at his ear, strides across Commonwealth Avenue and darts into a
Time was when Blanding would have been an unlikely recruiter for the school from which he's about to graduate. As a freshman, he was so disappointed in the dearth of diversity he found at BU that he almost transferred.
As one of the several thousand black and Latino students attending the elite colleges for which the Boston area is known, Blanding, a 20-year-old black New Yorker, arrived at BU seeking an urban university livelier and more heterogeneous than the small, overwhelmingly white Westchester County private school he'd attended since eighth grade.
He was eager to study where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate, hesitant to believe his grandparents' impression of Boston as a racially divided city, and hopeful after attending a reception during orientation that drew a small but diverse group that included Asian, Indian, Latino, and black students.
''Then I turned around," Blanding recalls, ''and I was alone."
Not only was BU less diverse than he'd hoped -- 2.5 percent of 16,000 undergraduates are African-American and5 percent are Latino -- but living in overflow housing at the Hyatt, across the Charles River from the campus bustle, and working weekends in the dining hall exacerbated his isolation. Yet he never sent the applications to other colleges lying on his desk.
''I was angry on both ends, with the general population at BU for not being as diverse as I had hoped. I was angry with myself for not having done extensive enough research. And I was angry with the black and Latino population for not being vocal enough," Blanding says. ''Then I began to realize -- and it's one of the reasons I didn't transfer -- what happens if every school is just like this? What happens if the workplace is just like this? I'm going to have to learn how to adapt."
Adapt he did.
After a shaky start academically, Blanding made the dean's list last year. He's president of Latinos Unidos, a member of the black student group Umoja, secretary of the Latino fraternity Phi Iota Alpha. He's a Big Brother and a lead tutor in a Chelsea after-school program. He's found mentors, among them the African-American dean of students, whose ''Coffee and Conversation" sessions he regularly attends. Blanding was one of two student speakers at BU's Martin Luther King Day commemoration in January. He's a political science major eyeing a political career and mulling joining Teach for America before law school.
Yet as comfortable as Blanding is with all kinds of people and as confident as he is of his place here, he remains attuned to the racial undercurrents that have him feeling he must constantly prove himself. Just as in high school, where he was among a handful of minority scholarship students enrolled through a program designed to prepare youngsters like him for colleges like this, fitting in has been a fitful process.
''The turnaround came when I started to realize this was my environment and I could have an effect on what was going on. Once I gained that ownership, I was able to be more open and do more things," Blanding says. ''This is my school. I'm a shareholder in this large corporation. I might as well do something meaningful with it. Since then I've been much more involved on campus. Out in Boston as well. Making this my city."
By the time Blanding arrived at BU, he'd already undergone the culture shock of moving from impoverished black and Latino communities to the predominantly white, affluent Hackley School. Weekdays he lived at the prep school, where ''people are driving Lexuses and BMWs and Hummers at 16 and I was still using a bus pass." Weekends he traveled 3 1/2 hours, via public transportation, home to Brooklyn. He was living with his mother, who died last winter of a brain hemorrhage. Previously, he'd resided in the Bronx with his Cuban-born grandmother while his mother battled drug addiction. His father was incarcerated for robbery for much of his childhood.
As a poor, black student in a college that's largely well-to-do and white, his color, Blanding says, trumps his class. ''My class I can't necessarily see," he says, ''so racial issues are always going to be more pervasive. They're just much more obvious and much more fundamental."
Blanding entered BU determined to dismount the racial seesaw he'd ridden in high school. At home in the city, family and friends accused him of ''acting white" or ''talking white." At Hackley, where, he recalls, classmates would say '' 'Wow, you're a gangster' as if to glorify it," he often felt ''too black." Gradually Blanding learned to flip with ease between a ''street" self that would ''speak slang and curse and be angry and rambunctious" when he was home and a ''professional" self that was ''charismatic and sophisticated" at school. He graduated Hackley finally able to be himself in either setting.
''I made a conscious decision when I came here that I was no longer going to continue with that dialectic between the two worlds I was coming from," Blanding says. ''It doesn't have to be a struggle. You don't have to compromise yourself," he adds. ''I don't feel part of either of those roots, but I also don't feel constrained by them either. I thought before I was half and half and I would never be a part of either one. Now I feel I can command both in a way that few other people can. That gives me great power, and it gives me a lot of confidence, and it gives me a lot of focus, and it gives me a lot of motivation."
So, when Blanding slips into Dean Kenneth Elmore's ''Coffee and Conversation," he sports the look he's favored since freshman year, a Yankees cap askew atop a do-rag, well aware that his headgear is more loaded than the bandana the white friend beside him has tied over his long hair.
''I'm a thug if I wear my cap and do-rag, but I still wear it. I will never sacrifice my integrity," Blanding says. ''I argue with people about this all the time. I still genuinely believe I can persuade people that I'm actually smart, that I actually have something substantive to offer even in a do-rag."
Blanding has five Yankees hats and multiple T-shirts from programs where he's worked as a tutor but owns no BU apparel.
''You'll see white students wearing BU sweatshirts, and they buy this at orientation or the first time they visit the school, and I don't think I've ever seen a black student walk around with that," Blanding says. ''It's not because we don't love BU. I happen to love BU," he adds. ''It's a subtle thing, that identification with the school."
It's a striking observation from a student pleased to be on a list of students who might appear in a recruitment video. Blanding does, however, own four Phi Iota shirts. The fraternity chapter draws members, mainly Latino, from BU and Northeastern, and the brothers are planning a citywide party Saturday expected to attract Latino students from several colleges.
Blanding joined Phi Iota after growing up with Puerto Ricans in the South Bronx and meeting Latinos at BU. ''I'd never really entertained a difference between blacks and Latinos until I came to college and I noticed that people separated," he says.
As an isolated freshman, Blanding befriended co-workers in the dining hall, and they introduced him to Boston's minority neighborhoods. Sophomore year, he began seeking student groups -- black, Caribbean, Latino -- that would be both haven and springboard in a large school.
''Plenty of people say, 'Why are black people so concerned with always having another black person or so concerned with asserting their blackness, because we're white students and you don't see us going around saying we're white.' At the same time, you are the majority," he says. ''I don't think white people have to deal with this notion of being an outsider."
Blanding was a sophomore in 2003 when Elmore was appointed dean of students. ''To be honest with you, I was happy because the man was black," Blanding recalls. ''I knew this was someone I could go to and establish a rapport. He would be as enthusiastic, because he was new, as I would be about building a relationship."
Elmore became a mentor, as did the black woman who heads the Howard Thurman Center, which hosts multicultural programs, and the white woman who heads the tutoring program where Blanding works.
''Junior year was really a big step. I started getting in touch with deans and personnel and administrators at BU and trying to really get them to know who I was and get to know who they were and work with those people," Blanding says. ''If I know this is Dean Elmore's school, this is Dave Blanding's school every bit as much. If people don't know what I've done on campus, it's hard for them to join with those organizations, and that's how freshmen feel isolated. In the future, if I need a recommendation, I need to know who to get them from."
Before convening the Latinos Unidos meeting, Blanding and other leaders circulate among the 60 in attendance, offering handshakes of welcome, creating the refuge Blanding yearned for as a freshman. Later, when the discussion turns to stereotypes outside the Latino community and within it, Blanding mentions running into people in the Bronx he hadn't seen in a while.
''They said, 'How much time did you do?' I said, 'I'm in college,' " Blanding recounts. ''I got angry about it. It's not just white people who have misconceptions. We think when we come back to the 'hood, we're coming from prison. When we act intelligent, we think we're acting white. It comes from us."
Blanding arrives promptly for his 1 p.m. course, ''The American Military Experience," acutely aware he was late a few times early in the semester, a transgression he says is made all the more obvious by his race. The subtext he senses is an attitude about affirmative action that he heard in high school and assumes that some harbor here.
''I can't get away with things that white students do because I'm going to be more noticeable. I have to be on my toes," Blanding says. ''You walk in and people say, 'Oh, it's a black person walking in late. He's on CP time, or he's not as smart or as qualified. He's not taking it seriously.' "
Blanding belongs to one of the most underrepresented groups on campus. ''To see a black American male is definitely rare," he says. ''Yes, affirmative action has made diversity an advantage, but not to the extent that it would make being white a disadvantage by any means."
What Blanding notices, research confirms. Only 12 percent of young black men age 22-34 have graduated from a four-year college, according to Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, compared with 21 percent of young black women, 25 percent of young white men, and 33 percent of young white women.
''Every day I have to be conscious of the fact that I'm black. I have to be conscious of the fact that I have to think of the future," Blanding says. ''Part of the reason I'm so eager to do well and go to the best schools is not only because of what I want to do but because I'm black. It's going to be much more pressing for me to prove myself."
He still berates himself for skipping classes and letting his grades slip to a 2.0 second semester freshman year. ''I was unhappy, and I sort of gave up," he says. He gradually worked his way to an A- average last year, which he's determined to meet or exceed this year to push his overall GPA above a 3.0. ''Sometimes," he says, ''I look and think everyone is walking around with a 3.0 or better, and it really unnerves me."
As Blanding looks ahead to graduation, he remembers the first-grade assignment in which he said he wanted to be president of the United States.
''Part of me really, really meant it. Part of me was trying to think outside the box and not come up with police officer or firefighter," he says. ''I wrote about how I'll follow in Martin Luther King's footsteps."
Blanding still has the same dream. Does he think the country will be ready for a black president?
''Martin Luther King once said a true leader has to be not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus," he says. ''It's not about waiting for people to be ready. It's about making people realize that they're ready."
