Clipping from an interview with Damon Prince
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Clipping from an interview with Damon Prince
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Description
Clip of an interview of Damon Prince conducted by Joshua Egwuatu on January 12, 2021. "D" Prince started at Tennessee Tech in 1992. Prince describes the pressure placed on Black students to succeed because of their visibility as minorities on campus.
Transcript:
Damon Prince: One of the things that I noticed that when I got here was I was—out of I think 11,000 students there were maybe only 300 Black students at the time. It may be smaller now, maybe more. But that is a big, big discrepancy in number. And so, I always felt like I was under the microscope. That no matter what I did, I had to do, I had to do it better than the white students because the expectation was that this Black kid's gonna come to this mostly white school, he's gonna drop out because he can't live up to our expectations. Now these expectations weren't set by certain people, certain teachers, the president, or anybody because those were all good people at the time. Well, but they were all good people. It's kind of a systematic standard that's set. It's like an ivy league school, you're expected to have a 3.5 or even if you have a 3.5 that's like graduating bottom of your class. You're expected to do these things and if you don't then it's like “well we knew that he wouldn't be able to because you know he's a black kid.” And so, knowing that I was under this microscope, it's kind of what drove me.
Transcript:
Damon Prince: One of the things that I noticed that when I got here was I was—out of I think 11,000 students there were maybe only 300 Black students at the time. It may be smaller now, maybe more. But that is a big, big discrepancy in number. And so, I always felt like I was under the microscope. That no matter what I did, I had to do, I had to do it better than the white students because the expectation was that this Black kid's gonna come to this mostly white school, he's gonna drop out because he can't live up to our expectations. Now these expectations weren't set by certain people, certain teachers, the president, or anybody because those were all good people at the time. Well, but they were all good people. It's kind of a systematic standard that's set. It's like an ivy league school, you're expected to have a 3.5 or even if you have a 3.5 that's like graduating bottom of your class. You're expected to do these things and if you don't then it's like “well we knew that he wouldn't be able to because you know he's a black kid.” And so, knowing that I was under this microscope, it's kind of what drove me.
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BCCOH_Prince_20210112_pressureclip
Citation
Prince, Damon, “Clipping from an interview with Damon Prince,” Tennessee Tech University Archives and Special Collections, accessed May 16, 2024, https://tntecharchives.omeka.net/items/show/386.
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