It turned out there were a lot of things I had yet to learn about life, or at least

life on the Princeton campus in the early 1980s. After I spent several energizing
weeks as a summer student, surrounded by a few dozen other kids who seemed
both accessible and familiar to me, the fall semester officially began, opening the
floodgates to the student population at large. I moved my belongings into a new
dorm room, a one-room triple in Pyne Hall, and then watched through my
third-floor window as several thousand mostly white students poured onto
campus, carting stereos and duvet sets and racks of clothes. Some kids arrived in
limos. One girl brought two limos—stretch limos—to accommodate all her stuff.

Princeton was extremely white and very male. There was no avoiding the
facts. Men on campus outnumbered women almost two to one. Black students
made up less than 9 percent of my freshman class. If during the orientation
program we’d begun to feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring
anomaly—poppy seeds in a bowl of rice. While Whitney Young had been
somewhat diverse, I’d never been part of a predominantly white community
before. I’d never stood out in a crowd or a classroom because of the color of my
skin. It was jarring and uncomfortable, at least at first, like being dropped into a
strange new terrarium, a habitat that hadn’t been built for me.

As with anything, though, you learn to adapt. Some of the adjustment was
easy—a relief almost. For one thing, nobody seemed much concerned about
crime. Students left their rooms unlocked, their bikes casually kickstanded outside
buildings, their gold earrings unattended on the sink in the dorm bathrooms.
Their trust in the world seemed infinite, their forward progress in it entirely
assured. For me, it was something to get used to. I’d spent years quietly guarding
my possessions on the bus ride to and from Whitney Young. Walking home to
Euclid Avenue in the evenings, I carried my house key wedged between two
knuckles and pointed outward, in case I needed it to defend myself.

At Princeton, it seemed the only thing I needed to be vigilant about was my
studies. Everything otherwise was designed to accommodate our well-being as
students. The dining halls served five different kinds of breakfast. There were
enormous spreading oak trees to sit under and open lawns where we could throw
Frisbees to relieve our stress. The main library was like an old-world cathedral,
with high ceilings and glossy hardwood tables where we could lay out our
textbooks and study in silence. We were protected, cocooned, catered to. A lot
of kids, I was coming to realize, had never in their lifetimes known anything
different.