As a Black person growing up in a white space, I’ve been forced to become very in tune with how others perceive me. I’ve always been very cognizant of other people’s perceptions of me, especially white people’s perceptions of me. As much as I would like to be someone that doesn’t care about what anyone thinks — I’ve had to care. I was in a school district where all my teachers were white, our entire administration was white and parents and community members responsible for me were white. As I’ve navigated my identity, the major consistency has been that the white people around me have loved how good I was at sports. But let’s backtrack for a moment.

I grew up in a small town in Westchester, New York that according to current census data is only 0.8 percent Black, and sometimes it felt even smaller. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that a 6’2” Black girl — aka me — might have a hard time navigating the most formative years of her life in a place like that. Just imagine trying to build confidence in a space where all that was praised seemed like the antithesis of what you were.

Trying to find a sense of belonging was something that was always really difficult for me. What finally came to ground me through these difficult transitions was basketball. It was something I was getting really good at, and more importantly it was something that I loved doing. I played Varsity basketball for five years with my high school program and I loved every minute of it. Still, I struggled. You see, over those five years I was the only Black girl to ever be on that team. That didn’t make me love my teammates any less, but I began to feel a certain burden accumulate. The fact that I was the only Black person within this space made me feel like I was responsible for my community’s perception of Blackness as a whole. I began to develop a deep-seated fear of what people might think about me without even knowing me. The worst part was that I knew they were making calculations based on something I had absolutely no control over — the color of my skin.

I forced myself to overachieve on all fronts because I really believed that no one would care about me if I didn’t. In my mind, if I put all these titles and awards and achievements to my name, nobody could prove their negative and racist suspicions about me right. 

Fast forward to Yale. Everything that I pushed myself so hard to achieve brought me here, but the pressures I created for myself quickly became a double-edged sword. My self-worth became far too contingent upon my academic and athletic success. I had spent my whole life convincing myself that those superficial accolades are what made me worth anything to those around me. The other trouble is that the rigors of Division I basketball and Ivy League academics are not compatible with such a heavy dependence on constant success. On top of that, in moving from one predominantly white space to another, many issues have carried over or even been amplified. The beautiful thing about this school though is that it has connected me with people who have felt this exact same struggle. If you talk to most any of the Black athletes here, there are so many stories of feeling tokenized or neglected, of success in sports being the main way we’ve felt unconditionally valued. But there’s more to life than sports, and there’s more to me than athletic performance. I refuse to be relegated or controlled by these power structures built to exploit Black bodies.

I still struggle with people’s perceptions of me, but I’m working hard to change that. I’ve come to realize that those people I have to “prove wrong” are not people worth impressing anyway. When you look in the right places, this community will hold you close for all the right reasons. There are so many people here who love and appreciate me outside of what I do on the basketball court. That doesn’t make it any easier to let myself struggle sometimes, but I’m learning to distinguish my worth from my accomplishments. I also know that I shouldn’t have to prove and define my value just because of the color of my skin. I love being Black, and I will never let anyone or anything take that away from me. It’s so draining to be told you are a credit to your race or to have to defend your own humanity. But each new day there’s beauty to be found in the struggle. There’s beauty in who I’m choosing to become. That matters to me.

GRACE THYBULLE is a sophomore in Branford college. She competes on the varsity basketball team and is looking to double major in Environmental Studies and African American Studies.  She can be reached at grace.thybulle@yale.edu.