Many of my professors have a strange propensity to look directly at me anytime they mention black people during class.

 

Sometimes it's a mere glance. At other times, they throw a little hand movement my way as if to say, "Yes, black people like that one right over there."

 

I've learned not to take it personally.

 

I guess they can't help it.

 

Whether there are more than 100 students or a mere handful, I'm usually the only black person--or, at best, one of three brown-skinned people--in any of my graduate and doctoral-level classes.

 

But to its credit, the University of Southern California has a fairly diverse student body. Roughly a quarter of grad students come from outside of the United States; 20 percent are Asian, 8 percent are Hispanic and 4 percent are black. Another 32 percent are white.

 

I'm practically allergic to numbers.

 

To over-simplify things, one could argue that education, higher education in particular, is a white-people thing.

 

Quite honestly, I've heard that argument several times in my 27 years of life.

 

I never knew that doing what you were supposed to do--like learning while you were in school--was a white thing to do. Until third grade, I attended an all-black private school, where learning and good behavior were encouraged, expected and enforced with corporal punishment, when necessary.

 

When I went to public school for third grade a new set of black kids told me I was "acting white" because I made straight A's, was in the gifted program and played violin.

 

I was still acting white in middle school when, instead of saying "Whateva" when someone teased me, I'd say "Whatever," which usually brought more taunts. I quickly found out that speaking properly was also a very "white" thing to do.

 

To them, I was an "Oreo." Black on the outside, but white on the inside.

 

I eventually switched from playing the violin to playing a "blacker" instrument--the trumpet. I stopped hanging around a girl who had been my best friend since third grade; she was white.

 

Despite my best efforts at a "black make-over," I began attending a magnet high school in eighth grade, instead of staying at the middle school. That too was apparently a very white thing to do, since it was a majority-white school.

 

When I let my peers know that Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, D.C., was the only school I applied to for college, I got a new kind of jeer. This time, my white schoolmates criticized me: Why do you want to segregate yourself at a black school?

 

After graduating early from Howard, I entered my first newsroom in Louisiana.

I soon learned that some folks (mainly my boss) also considered journalism a "white thing."

 

After a staff diversity workshop, composed of about 30 reporters, photographers and editors who did group exercises addressing the differences that "color our world," one of my bosses said something I'll never forget.

 

"You know they're only in our newsrooms because of affirmative action," he said.

 

By "they," he meant blacks, and, well, I was his only black subordinate. So, he must have been talking about me.

 

The racial proportions of my life's adventures have come full circle a few times so far.

 

Here at USC, I once again find myself to be, as my mama says, "the fly in the buttermilk." Out of place, and obviously the "other".

 

But this time around, when I'm pointed out--whether it's intentional or a simple knee-jerk reaction--I can't help but smile.