#TheRealUW is when you are sleeping in your room freshman year and you hear your roommate, who is also in your room five feet away from you, telling someone from your floor he “would have preferred a white roommate,” to which the other person responds, “Well, at least he isn’t black.”

During sophomore year I was attending a ceremony where I, along with many other people from my Posse Cohort, were being awarded for all our hard work freshman year. Before we got our awards, we got to hear how Posse was started on campus — hold on to your seats everyone.

So this old white man that helped make the decision got on stage and talked about how University of Wisconsin lacked so much diversity that large companies would stop coming to job fairs because the students here (read: white students) had no experience or competence interacting with people of color.

So their solution? Start bringing Posses, which are largely made up of people of color, from different cities in order to make this campus more diverse.

Think about that. One of the big reasons this university wanted my scholarship program here was so that it could get larger companies to come back and hire their mostly white graduates by showing that they have experience interacting with people of color. UW uses us a learning experience for our white peers in order to make them more appealing to employers. Shame on UW for using their students of color as tools.

–Damien Outar