I see black people!

It all started in my statistics discussion class last Friday. People are already beginning to plan their disguises for Halloween, and my classmates started to quiz each other on what their alter egos would be. The girls, as expected, talked about costumes like nurses, witches and sexy maids. The guys' ideas ran the gamut; one guy insisted that he would dress up as a ketchup bottle.\nSomebody asked me what I was going to dress up as for Halloween, and I said the first thing that popped into my head:\n"I'm going as a black man on a white campus!"\nThe class responded with a hearty laugh. I chuckled at my own wittiness for a quick second, and then realized that behind every joke, there is at least a little truth. In this case, there's a lot of truth.\nBlack folks know what I'm talking about. Even if we don't know one another's names, we still acknowledge each other when we see each other on the street. There are so few black people here, we don't have time for bad blood.\nAt my high school, Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, my freshman class started out with a little more than 1,000 students. Four years later, 200 graduated. Doing the math, my school was 60 percent black, 35 or so percent white and the remaining percentages were divided amongst Latin, Asian and random African kids. Losing 80 percent of your freshman class to things like arrest, pregnancy, dropping out, etc., is bad enough, but out of the 200 that made it out alive, I estimate around 40 percent of the 200 were white, and 55 percent were black, with the rest scattered amongst the other ethnicities.\nTo make matters worse, only 80 or so total students out of the graduating 200 went to college. A few more went into the armed forces, but as for many of them, I have no idea where they are now.\nProportionally, if 55 percent of my graduating class was black and 80 students went to college, that means 44 black students out of the original 600 in the freshman class made it to the gates of higher education. Now repeat this scenario in many of Indiana's inner-city schools, then make sure you add in the margin first-year college dropouts, which will bring the numbers down further. There are five high schools in my school district. For the sake of argument, lets say that each of those five high schools had 44 college-bound black graduates, totaling 220. Using IU as an example, IU's retention rate floats between 80 and 90 percent for freshmen. Being generous enough to use the 90 percent figure, I estimate that out of those 220 black collegians from my school district, 198 will remain after sophomore year.\nFinally, divide those 198 remaining Indianapolis inner-city black collegians between the eight major public colleges in Indiana, and you start to see why a black face is a welcome one, not just at IU, but at any Indiana college. Adding in all the blacks from other school districts throughout the state and those from out of state, we finally arrive at the 5 percent figure that most Indiana colleges have when it comes to black student populations.\nFive percent of 39,000 is 1,950. Lets round that up to 2,000, just for the sake of having nice round numbers. That means only one out of every 20 faces in a class at IU is black. Most classes, save for the big lecture classes, only have 20 students in them.\nOn Friday in my statistics discussion, I was that 20th person. That's why every year at Halloween, I go out without a costume. On this campus, I'm already incognegro.