When I think of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a community of different races is not the topic that pops into my head; if anything, it’s quite the contrary.
When I walk around this campus, almost everyone I see is white. It didn’t really hit me until one day when I was on the bus and saw a black person sitting across from me. I was a little surprised at first and didn’t understand why. I realized it was because it was not something I saw every day and that thought troubled me. I wondered if it was because I just wasn’t paying attention or if it really was because we had a significantly small number of blacks on our campus. Working at the SERF, I sometimes see hundreds of students during my shifts, and what I noticed was that while UW has a noteworthy Asian population, the black population is by far the smallest.
Each student at UW is unique. We have students with all different disabilities, sexual orientations, races and socioeconomic statuses. But year after year, our school is given a grade of “F” for affordability. So what does that mean for the makeup of our campus? It means at the end of the day, our campus is made up of mainly middle- to upper-class white students. One way to address this issue is to provide more need-based financial aid.
If you take any ethnic studies course on campus you will learn people of color are more likely to have lower socioeconomic statuses, which means many times they are required to work twice as hard to earn a living and succeed. I don’t know the statistics for the number of black students versus the number of white students who apply to the school or the percentage of those students that get in. But I am willing to bet a considerable number of students are not able to attend due to financial constraints.
Our campus is predominately white and the first step in creating a climate of differing races starts with creating financial opportunities that allow those students access to the university.
Christine Shidla
Junior, consumer affairs
