what you learn being poor at harvard

nothing is ever as it seems

disclaimer: the views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any employer, past or current. everything written to have happened is alleged and although based on “true” stories, is not indicative of who people are today. the past is the past.

introduction: welcome to my unreal world

i've always had a fetish for the truth. i disdain bullshit. and i don’t do illusions. i am, however, in the business of fantasy. as i explained in my wisdom of whores essay, i will always choose to exist in an economy of love as opposed to an economy of favors. my sense of worth will never be about what i contribute to a situation. although given my capricorn influences, i will always seek to contribute more and more and more. after all, there’s real dignity in work. and we should all find work we’re proud to do.

when i was eight years old, i told my parents that i intended, in 10 years time, to attend harvard college. i was an immigrant to a country whose history i had only begun to grasp. but even in my adolescent brain, and my very limited knowledge of american history, i understood one thing and one thing only: smart people, in this country, go to harvard. and at eight years old, i thought i was smart. so doing transitive property that only a child could do, i begun to cling to the idea of me attending harvard. once my mind was set, and my parents were informed, i went about the next 10 years with one vision in mind: my acceptance letter from harvard college.

and it came. on the 6th of december 2017, i received an email with the words i had been dreaming about since stephenie meyer rocked my world with her twilight series: congratulations.

and it’s funny, because a day or two before, i had told my mother about this dream i had where i was in the back of a black, armored car with nicki minaj (when i tell you i’ve been a barb since the first iphone came out, i really mean that. i am true to this, not new to this) and nicki told her driver, “hey, do you know my girl just got into harvard?” and upon hearing my recollection of this absurd short dream, my mother said, “oh, you’ll totally get in.”

nicki has always been the harbinger of truth.

anyways, the funny thing about harvard is that it’s an absurd place with absurd people who do and say absurd things. i call it unreality. it’s not a real place. it’s hardly a college. it’s really an institution. and what i mean by that is that it’s chief function, as relayed to me by a favorite preceptor of mine, is to facilitate its students’ ease of dealing with, and hopefully becoming, the elites.

it has institutionalized elite production.

and the way it does that is myriad. and complex. and im sure there are countless books written by people with legitimate phds in some type of field that qualifies them to speak on it. but the way i’d like to walk you through it is less from an academic sense and more from a personal one. from my lived experiences being poor at a very wealthy institution.

the gold digger who makes boys cry and makes us all look bad

one thing i’ve always appreciated about angela merkel, christine largarde, dambisa moyo, and even delphine arnault is how serious these women are. i can’t imagine pulling a fast one on any of them and that’s inspiring to me as a young woman who has consistently experienced people mistaking my bubbly deposition as a naiveté that hints at a lack of situational awareness.

and i do think there were moments when this was true. moments when i was just a kid. albeit one with a lots of guts, vision, and a relentless faith in myself and my future. in this moment in time, i had just arrived on harvard’s campus. it was opening days and when i met the boy that would become my college boyfriend, i knew he would and i told my friends so. two months into our freshman year, we were officially exclusive.

turns out, i’m also the harbinger of truth.

now, the funny thing about how my college boyfriend and i came to be, and what we came to represent, is that it was my first introduction to the politics of privilege, the importance of perception, and that you should never assume things are what you think they are.

in choosing my college boyfriend, i didn’t choose this other boy who was close with a girl i was friends with. or so i thought. despite me not choosing the other boy, he and i remained friends. or so i thought. and what began as a misunderstanding, over snickerdoodle cookies if you can believe it, turned into accusations, on his part, of me being a gold digger (the other boy was “richer”) and heart breaker (i had made him cry when he found out i choose my college boyfriend and not him). and my friend, on her part, agreed. and so, she went to the rest of our friend group and said many things that amounted to one thing: “diouana woman is a gold digger (because she’s black) and we should excommunicate her from our friend group (because she’s poor).”

and on a random tuesday, when i texted the group chat for us all to hang out and was met with silence, but saw that everyone was commenting on each other’s instagrams, i understood i now found myself in a cold war but didn’t know exactly why nor when it started. and because the other boy (not the college boyfriend) was close to the girl who was in my friend group, i reached out to him for help. sitting in annenberg together, he disclosed that in his anger towards me, he expressed his frustrations in not so kind terms to her but as he and i had made up since then, he hadn’t thought about the situation much and continued to view me in positive terms. but his anger towards me, and he the way he painted, had tainted my standing, so to speak, in the eyes of this friend group i had cultivated. and in the middle of my the first semester of my freshman year, i found myself without friends. completely abandoned by a group of girls i genuinely happened to like. we had even all met each other’s parents! like, we were really gang.

a bunch of other instances happened where these girls were not kind to me. but the details of those moments are irrelevant and are more indicative of a larger narrative: i had appeared, at first, to be one of them. meaning, beautiful and wealthy.

the wealthy part is key here.

when it was discovered, from my lack of being able to do omakase with them every week (it was true that my mother bankrolled my existence while in undergrad but that extended only from my dorm room to the sixth floor stacks of widener; i couldn’t even do a tatte order without her whatsapping me and asking me why i was spending money that wasn't mine to begin with) that i wasn’t as wealthy as they thought, the reality of the fact that i was dating this boy, whose father happened to be the ceo of a company they all knew of was presented in a different light in their minds.

the politics of this is fascinating as its own sociological analysis. on one hand, i thought my “standing” in white harvard had taken a hit (it didn’t; those girls were mean and everyone knew it therefore anything they said was taken with a fat grain of salt by our peers) due to this gold digger label that was being hurdled by mean girls.

and on the other hand, whatever standing i could have had in black harvard was nonexistent because i was dating a white guy. and in their own words, i was in the sunken place. i believe the exact words were, “we lost a sister, and a dark skin one at that.”

and these two harvards, black and white harvard, are different because culturally they’re the rarely the same. white harvard is the space of nepo babies. black harvard, either by happenstance or design, is the space of first-gen (not necessarily from an collegiate perspective) african immigrants. those are two vastly different cultures and they value different things in the people they let in. not just from a race perspective.

for example, your caché in white harvard is who you know. those girls who turned on me, out of jealousy, spite, racism, pick one or all three, were my entrance into white harvard because at parties people would say to me, “oh, you’re friends with so and so.” my college boyfriend, from a sociological perspective, only served to reinforce that i was already in. it’s those girls, as cruel as they were, that got me in.

black harvard, you’re in if you’re black. yes. but you’re also in if we like you and think you’re chill. for example, i remember being at this party, hosted by black harvard, and i found this egyptian classmate (who turned out to not even be a college student) to be so extra and doing too much. but someone then told me, “oh, but black harvard likes him so we let him rock.” so i let him rock. even though he was doing too much. he was already in and i had no power to kick him out. nor any desire to.

different worlds, different cultural systems.

and so, when i found myself, seemingly, friendless and kinless, i clinged to my college boyfriend because he was the only friend i thought i had. this wasn’t true, of course. but there i was, 18-19, so scarred by what i had just experienced that i thought my whole social life was over. of course, this is the mindset of a teenager, which is what i was at the moment. and if i were to go back in time, i would just go outside and find a new friend group and things would have been back to normal by the spring. but i didn’t know i could change the narrative so easily at 18-19. everything felt fatal.

i hadn’t yet cultivated emotional resilience in that way. so my first couple of years at harvard were painful because i went from being a confident, self-assured teenager to being a young woman afraid of her own shadow.

and it was interesting trying to articulate what i was experiencing to my college boyfriend. i told him about the gold digger accusations, and he quipped, “what are they talking about, you work harder than i do.” and that’s been a consistent theme with me. ask any man i’ve ever dated and he’ll do you that i work haaaaaard. maybe even harder than him. i swear i was a capricorn in my past life.

and so to know that you’re someone who refuses to sing for their supper, and will only eat what they kill, it was heartbreaking to have my character questioned in such a way. especially by people who hadn’t worked nearly as hard i had to be where i was. and it led to complexes that were a waste of my time, like self doubt. when realistically, i was killing the game.

for example, throughout my entire time at harvard, i was on the board of directors for the harvard cooperative society.

as an aside, i just want to state that i have been a member of some type of board of directors, domestic and international, since i was 16 years old. back in college, sure people could disrespect me by telling lies about my character. now? you need to put respect on my name to even engage with me. i sincerely mean that. do you know why? because there was a period in time when i was 16-17 when i was on a flight every single weekend for a month straight going to and from board meetings. i was writing my ap lang essays in the airport lounge at washington dulles. so, to be accused of anything other than being a workaholic is blasphemous.

so, as a board director of the harvard cooperative society, i, alongside the other directors, allocated funds to build playgrounds, host cultural events, and approved how much money we invested with our investment advisors. one day, the president sends us an email to let us know that one of our partners has signed a deal with another company and he’s going to be meeting with the ceo of that company to make sure that deal doesn’t disrupt our revenue stream from our partner. in reading his email, the name of the company our partner had just partnered with sounded awfully familiar. turns out, the president of the harvard cooperative society was emailing us as directors to let us know he would be meeting with my college boyfriend’s dad, since he was ceo of the company at that time. i learned then that the world is a very, very small.

and even though i did the work of putting myself in the eyesight of ceos, even the president of the cooperative will tell it’s harder to get on that board of directors than it is to get into harvard, there i was being mistreated by a group of mainly white girls who didn’t see my hard work, nor know my childhood of absolute committed audacity to my dream of getting into harvard (when no member of my family had ever gotten into an ivy) or even my early childhood in my west african village, and it was perplexing to me. i was confused by how they were treating me, not on account of the resume i was cultivating but because they didn’t think that i should be dating who i was dating.

because i was black and not wealthy yet he was white and wealthy. you would think people wouldn’t care about such things, but the freshman at harvard seemingly do.

and this whole saga made me really reflect on the world my college boyfriend and i lived in. not america necessarily. but this liminal space that can be termed as a white world.

because at that point, he and i both only existed in a white world. what i mean by that, it that we had met through white harvard, a white world, not black harvard, a black world. our shared friends were all white. and although i was getting grief on both sides, the grief from white harvard had higher stakes. because who wants to be friends with a gold digger? you can’t do much with that kind of bounty on your head.

and what’s interesting is that i would later find out that what i was being accused of being paled in comparison to what other people were actually doing. the lengths people were actually going to achieve their aims.

as balzac said, my fall from grace has love as it’s excuse. it’s sole excuse.

everyone else? greed. money. power.

from that perspective, it’s not an interesting story. but i do touch upon it in an interesting way later in this essay.

but the good thing that arose from all of this. the accusations, the loss of friends, the feeling of emotional isolation, was love. and what it looks like to be seen for who you are. not what you do. nor what you have.

my college boyfriend and i never related to each other from a racial perspective, outside of an acknowledgment of our respective races. it was a relationship that was built upon a shared sense of drive. and a shared internal feeling that we both were destined to do great things. become great people.

he being the next elon musk. and me being whoever i wanted to be.

and in the way we communicated with each other, through the articles we texted one another on the social, political, and economic dynamics of the world around us, reinforced out viewpoints. not only of the world, but of each other.

in reminiscing on our relationship, while sitting on a white bench outside memorial church in the wee hours of a crisp fall day during our senior year, he said to me, “i chose you because you and i could speak for hours and it would never become boring.”

when he and i still spoke, he and i would gossip like schoolgirls.

my friends, to this day, never understood what i saw in him, especially what i endured as a result of that relationship. in addition to that, they found him cold. and he was. exceptionally cold in fact. ice that doesn’t melt. but he was brilliant. and he and i saw the world exactly the same. and that alignment in perspective, and commitment to a vision, that is what a lasting partnership is built on. at least, that’s what i’m experiencing now. so my college boyfriend doesn’t get all the credit.

the other one, that instigated the gold digger accusations to begin with, may have brought me snickerdoodle cookies on his way back from fencing practice, but the one i chose in college understood, and appreciated, my ambition above all else. he affirmed my work ethic. and that recognition was worth all the snickerdoodle cookies in the world to me.

are they still racist if they let you in?

while you had these interesting dynamics play out on racial lines, you had far more interesting scenarios occur on economic lines.

in any place where human beings are asked to socialize with each other, a hierarchy will naturally form. and harvard is no different.

at the top of the hierarchy is what i call the scene.

now, the scene, from my lived experience, was entitled billionaire heiresses, evil turkish mafia princesses, unforgiving aristos, and the rich kids who were just happy to be there.

that was the scene. and probably still is. that place does’t much.

and how do i know that?

well, i had a lunch with an alum who graduated class of 1975 or somewhere in that decade during my college years. the first thing this man asks me when we sit down is, “is harvard still racist?”

imagine being a white man attending harvard in the 70s and thinking to yourself, “wow, this place sure is racist. damn. that sucks.”

just the thought of that was so funny to me when he said it over lunch. like the saying goes, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

and to be fair to my alma mater. because if i am anything, i am grateful. i do not believe harvard as an institution is racist. i believe (some of) the students while i was there were racist. there were some professors that got a side eye from me once or twice, but they were just doing their job.

now, racism is a serious accusation. and remember what i said in my essay, if everyone is racist, then no one is racist: “the function of the system is not what it’s purported to be, but what it actually does.”

so, even though i believe certain peers of mine were indeed racist, harvard, as an institution, still set us all up to be successful in our own respective ways. including the black ones. and the asian ones. and every other ethnic minority that graduated from there. or dropped out to launch a startup.

daddy harvard was never the issue. it was always the progeny you had to keep an eye on.

now back to the scene: the scene is important because that’s where the absurdity of harvard comes in. the scene is what makes harvard unreality, to use my terminology. it’s what makes it not a real place on earth. because the things that people do to not only get into the scene, but stay in the scene, is appalling.

just to give you a taste, an appetizer if you will, of the lengths people go to get into the scene, i’ll share with you a story. it’s a favorite of mine:

during a punch cycle, basically our rush process, it was found out that one of the presidents of one of the final clubs called (or referred to or said in the presence of) one of the “black” punches the n word. now punches is the term for the students, usually sophomores, who are seeking entry into a final club as a member.

what was interesting to me about this incident, outside of my hunch of this president being racist finally confirmed, is that the punch in question wasn’t necessarily black (i don’t remember if they identify as black as they’re 1/4 black and extremely white passing) but the fact that that final club still had the most number of black punches confirmed that year.

meaning, even after everyone found out that the president had called one of the so called black punches the n word, every single black person who received an offer from that club accepted it.

to be fair to the club, they changed their president after it happened. so every black punch that was now a member would be under new leadership. but isn’t it about the legacy of a space? isn’t it always about the legacy of a space?

for me, it’s the principal of the situation that matters most. legacy is its own thing. and this story is indicative of a larger narrative that i continuously saw: people, mainly black people, would routinely criticize these so called elitist enclaves, the scene as it were, to the point of calling them racist and white supramcist and all that.

yet. yet. yet.

when presented with the opportunity to join, knowing that it would lead to hanging out in the hamptons on a yacht, partying in the country estate of a classmate whose family has owned land in the region since the medicis were plotting their way into the papacy through usury, and being inducted into this small circle of very wealthy, extremely well-connected people, everyone, for the most part, said yes. white supremacy be damned i guessed. or did it ever exist in the first place?

and that’s an important thing to highlight because it’s the hypocrisy of it all that makes the whole thing laughable. and like i said, racism is a serious accusation. it’s not a laughing matter. and yet. i cackled when i found out about that final club that ended up with the most black punches was the one where the president had said the n word to a black punch during punch because that is extremely on brand for everyone involved: black harvard and white harvard.

it’s a funny thing. what people will put up with for access to money and power.

thus, everyone did what i thought they were going to do.

and by the end of my journey at harvard, having begun as this isolated, emotionally volatile teenager, i ended up a woman who understood one fundamental truth above all else: nothing is as it seems, everything is as it should be.

and so to witness my peers enter these elite enclaves as members, paying semester dues as college students that amount to my current monthly rent as a working professional, and then turn around and cry white supremacy and racism and everything else that fit the argument when things didn’t go their way (or someone else’s way), was extremely funny to me. in a greek tragedy sense. like at first it’s funny. then it’s not. but ultimately, it’s still funny.

and i say that as a black woman who did experience racist incidents first-hand, at the hands of my peers, while at harvard.

multiple, opposing things can be true at the same time.

because here’s the thing you need to understand. and this speaks to our larger world, and current sociopolitical circumstances:

the system as it functions today was built off of white male millennia. it wasn't until 1977 that harvard even allowed women into the college. we had to go to radcliffe if we wanted to get educated. so, my peers, both white and black, who entered this elitist institution and then found themselves within its elitist enclaves, the scene as it were, and began extracting benefits from that scene, both tangible and intangible, who then turned around criticized it without acknowledging their own culpability to the beast that they were feeding by existing in these enclaves in the first place, was absolutely eye opening to me.

and witnessing this taught me that people will do anything if it means they’ll be able to get close to money and power.

what’s racial pride if it means you get to hang out on a yacht in the hamptons? what’s the price of true friendship if it means you get to party in a 18th century italian villa with the other aristos?

and witnessing the answers to these questions taught me to not trust people by the things they say, but rather what they do.

for example, some of the black harvard peers i had, who were most vocal on issues of social and economic justice were the same ones who were the closest with some of our white harvard peers who would weaponize their wealth when it suited them.

for example, and this is a favorite, because it’s as iconic as it is appalling:

when a classmate found out that the likelihood of them getting into the final club they wanted was low, they not only phoned their father who phoned his former final club to put pressure on the final club their child was interested in, but my classmate also just went ahead and bought the house they final club was renting as their home base. thereby becoming the landlord of the final club. i don’t know about you, but i would just accept my landlord if it meant i didn’t get evicted from my social space.

and on the scale of all the things that happened while i was there, i don’t even think this is the worst of it. my view is that that classmate knew what they wanted and ensured it was an inevitable end. i can respect that. the game is the game.

and what i saw at harvard mirrors what i see today in the larger culture:

we are a nation that is being fed by a beast. a beast that was cultivated over white male millennia that was built upon the enslavement of a black people.

and to not acknowledge our own culpability in how this beast continues to feast, not only on certain segments of our nation’s populace but certain nations of our globe, is a funny and interesting thing to me. but that’s an essay for another time.

so in this question of the extent to which people go to to get what they want, the extent to which people go to ensure they’re able to benefit from the very same things they say they disdain, it should be acknowledged that there has to be a line in the sand. or at the very least an acknowledgement that you’re only in it for the money. for the power. for your own sense of greed.

my favorite group of people at harvard were the ones that acknowledged that they were playing the game. it had a set of implicit rules and they were following it perfectly.

i, with my rebellious streak, could never kiss the ring. especially after that freshman year episode. besides, i understood after that upheaval that the system was rigged and the game was a house of cards anyway. as are most things built off of false notions of privilege and assumptions of hierarchy.

what’s interesting is that the people who took this same position existed at the extreme ends of harvard’s bell curve, economically speaking. they were my second favorite group of people. the ones who didn’t need to play the game at all, either because their existing wealth (and network) meant they didn’t have to or they didn’t want to play as elitist games held no appeal to them, morally speaking. these people weren’t in it for the game, they were in it for the friendship. however it came.

in a social system that incentivized people to give into their most base instincts, you either had so much money that none of it really mattered to you, which was its own world, or you didn’t have enough money so you opted out, which was another play.

having cultivated friendships across both of these groups, i found myself by the end of my harvard experience straddling both words: the haves and the haves nots. but it was extreme, as is the running theme at harvard. so much so that one day you found yourself texting a billionaire heiress about your lunch plans later that week and that same evening you found yourself laughing with a friend in the dinning hall about the absurdity of being poor in a wealthy place and that it’s the endowment that keeps you in the game.

basically, someone’s father (or mother) always pays the bill at harvard: either daddy harvard as we would all affectionally say or some guy, probably facing tax evasion. and by the end of it, you learn not to judge. and just revel in the absurdity of it all. and there‘s a fun to that.

just ask my boyfriend, i keep telling him about this white collar criminal (alleged) that i’m obsessed with. that man is the definition of absurd. and a testament to the fact that the very wealthy play by a different set of rules.

and to that point, if we’re really being honest, none of us, outside of a few number of students, were truly poor. we just weren’t billionaires.

you shouldn’t be ashamed of being rich, you should be ashamed of being ungrateful

so, what did i learn from being poor at harvard?

gratitude is paramount. jealousy is commonplace. and if you got it, baby, flaunt it.

i’m serious. we should all be free to exist as we are. in the circumstances that have shaped us, inclusive of the people that have helped us.

no one makes it on their own.

along the way, we have sponsors, mentors, friends, lovers, bankers, and anyone else we need to help carry us through.

and there’s this larger narrative that it’s noble to have done it on your own. sure. maybe. but the toll that takes on your body. your health. your spirit. let alone your beauty. but again, you already know how i feel about beauty. is not worth the noble mark of being someone “who made it on their own.” also, consider the fact that no one else is making it on their own.

for example, i remember when i would engage with certain classmates and i just questioned how they got in (because they did something for me to question it in the first place), and then i found myself studying in a room that bore their last name. if it weren’t for some member of their family, i wouldn’t have had the opportunity to study in such a quiet and serene place. so, i stopped questioning how people got in after that and just accepted the reality of the situation.

i believe the only thing you need is work ethic. if you’re willing to do the work, help is sure to come.

whatever vision you have for yourself, even if you have nothing today, if you’re willing to remain relentless towards that vision, you’ll achieve it. and the help you need to get you towards the finish line will arrive. even if you had tried your hardest to do it by yourself. i like to think that god has a sense of humor. we think life will go one way, but he ensures it goes another. this is why maintaining the ability to pivot, no matter how deck is shuffled, is key.

fluidity is the hallmark of success as our path to it is often non linear. one day you’re “poor” at a wealthy institution, then you’re thrown into a hellish work environment with sycophantic workaholics who don’t appreciate your sorority girl demeanor and tell you you’re just “a little girl who thinks she knows what she’s doing”, then you’re at your mother’s house lamenting your zig zagged career, and then you find yourself connecting with beautiful, hardworking women through your writing.

you’ve got to let it flow.

the trick to all of this is to remain harmonious with the serepiditous nature of your life and continue to be in alignment as it unfolds.

oh, and be grateful.

sweet dreams,
a diouana woman

p.s. truth or dare

you know how in your diary, you write something down then rip it out and place it in the tiny makeup bag you keep in your purse as a manifestation method? yeah, these p.s. truth or dares are the digital versions of my little ripped off notes.

truth: telling the truth and shaming the devil.

dare: ignoring your own culpability in a situation. are you the pot or the kettle?