Blog Post 6: Being Black at a PWI

In Lynette Adkins’ YouTube video, “Being Black at a PWI | UT,” she interviews different black students that attend the University of Texas about their experiences finding community on campus. What we know and what we assume about Lynette as the author of the piece are different, though.

In the video, Lynette doesn’t once state that she herself identifies as a black person or that she is even a student at University of Texas. We can’t even deduce that fact from the video’s description, only from her profile picture, and even that is an assumption. We can make the assumption that Lynette is a black student at UT based off of a few context clues:

1. The students she is interviewing seem comfortable speaking to her about their experiences being black at the university and they may not be as comfortable if she were white.

2. When she is interviewing Shalom, Lynette comments at the end that “it’s very awkward” in response to Shalom mentioning race being brought up in classes, which seems to be a comment based on her own experiences.

3. White people may be less inclined to make this video in the first place because they can’t speak to the experience.

This is how we, as viewers, assume Lynette to be a black student at UT, but we never find out for sure, which ties into her purpose of the piece overall. In the piece, Lynette isn’t sharing her own experiences or telling her story but is giving other black students the platform to share their stories. This highlights the issue in a stronger way because there are multiple students experiencing the same issue and experiencing it from different perspectives, like being both LGBTQ+ and black, biracial, or “token” black. The purpose of this piece is to tell hidden stories to the rest of the UT community because, as Christian says, “African-Americans are only 2% of the population [there].”

Which is the perfect segue to the question “who is the audience of this piece?” The audience, from my perspective, is the university minus the black population. The video opens by Terrane stating that “people keep on talking about how Austin is a really liberal place and it’s really diverse, but it’s not,” and the key word in this statement that lines up the rest of the video is “people.” Who are the people that say Austin is diverse and liberal? In this context, Terrane is likely talking about white students and the predominantly-white administration because, with the black population being less than 2% at UT, the white people are the ones that see a few black people or people of color and have the privilege to call the city/university “diverse.”

YouTube was the most successful platform for this type of story because it gives faces to the stories Lynette is trying to tell. By clipping together each interview, she morphs these separate stories into one narrative, which is exactly the point. She’s trying to say that these few black people on campus have different lives, but are coming together in this video to form one story: it’s difficult for black people to find their place at a predominantly-white institution.