Demar Matthews, a black architecture student describes one of the micro-aggressions that he has encountered in school:
Recently I experienced a changing incident with a professor who was reviewing my work alongside that of my classmates after a pin-up. He was excited about all the work and decided to issue individual comparisons to architects in the field. He went down the line commenting to my [white] classmates: “You could be like Eisenman,” ”You could be like Frank Gehry,” etc. When he got to me, he failed to think of an architect who looked like me, and instead said that I could “be like Obama, because there aren’t many black architects.”
His article, which was featured in Archinect earlier this year, is moving and describes the very real challenges of black architecture students in America.
You can read the full article here.
Image credit: Demar Matthews