There were questions in the air as we sat in the auditorium, such as, “Will the professor of our African American History class actually show up today?” and, “Why does it seem that a third of the students have dropped this class already?” but perhaps the biggest thing on everyone’s mind seemed to be, “Who’s the black guy in the Spider-Man t-shirt playing with the lights at the teacher’s desk?”

As the man flipped switches, shadows of my baseball cap and triangles that only black girl’s hairdo’s could pull off bounced around the room, making it impossible to work on my Algebra homework any longer. Instead I thought to myself… “there are forty students in a class. three of them are not considered black by American standards. three fifths of those who would be considered black were born in Africa. what is the algebraic formula for figuring out how many students were born in the United States?” Bah!!!

After five minutes of silent disco-strobe the man spoke. At first he apologized for the light show, he was only trying to figure out which switch controlled the lecture screen behind him, then went on to say, “…also, I’m sorry I wasn’t here on the first day of class. There was a misunderstanding between myself and the school. My bad. I really am more professional than that… I’ve been teaching Black Studies for a minute now.”

All right! Now we were getting down to business… Well, not really. All I had in my mind of how this course was gonna go was laid out like a bad episode of the Cosby spin-off, A Different World, and this was my version of Spellman College. Dr Jones began his lecture straight away by talking about Egypt. Within five minutes we were discussing the construction of the pyramids. After six minutes he was saying that their construction should be a source of pride for all black people. After seven he was talking about aliens. Besides the fact that he fails to mention slave labor’s role in the making of this ”source of black people’s pride,” and besides the fact that Egypt’s three kingdoms really has nothing to do with the history of black people in America, and besides the fact that he admits that almost all slaves brought across the Atlantic came from West Africa, I was really having a good time listening to this guy go! It reminded me why I was so excited to attend this college. For the most part, the instructor’s have been more than adequate, but really, its the ethnic make-up of the student body that makes Montgomery College’s Takoma Park campus so intriguing. East Africans, black Americans, Salvadoreans, West Africans, south Asians, central Asians, and a sprinkling of Pollacks just to make things interesting. To give you an idea … at the on-campus textbook store where I now work, out of a staff of thirty there are two employees who were born in the US: myself and the assistant manager.

Even before I had really travelled anywhere I had been driven by an urge to move, but since I’m too broke to buy a plane ticket, then I’ll have the world brought to me.