For most college alumni, memories of Spring Break involve bikinis, beer, and bad decisions. I was more than a little bit of a geek, and all my Spring Breaks during college were spent, in part, representing my college in the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge. Students from 48 Historically Black Colleges and Universities meet each year to compete for thousands of dollars in grants for their alma maters. For over thirty years, Honda has supported this program and provided many hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to participating schools.

My participation in HCASC was both entirely accidental and also seemingly fated. I randomly met a HCASC team member my first semester in school while waiting to catch a city bus to head to my job. I sparked up a conversation with a guy I thought I recognized from my Logic class (it wasn’t him), and somehow managed to get an audition for the team. You see, I’d done Quiz Bowl type academic competitions all through high school - I have what I like to call a landfill brain - all sorts of garbage (useful or not) goes in, and just never seems to go out. However it is that my brain works, it’s a good fit for these kinds of competitions. I’m an insufferable know-it-all with a wide competitive streak. It didn’t hurt that I’d watched Jeopardy! almost nightly with my folks since grade school.

When my teammates and I finally went to my first regional competition, I have to admit, I experienced my first true culture shock. Before my arrival, it just never sunk in that the competition brought together students from historically BLACK colleges and universities, and that most of the other participants would be Black. As a standard issue white girl, I had had very few occasions in my life where I was in the minority. My elementary school was a progressive “urban grade school;” but still about a 50/50 split between white kids and BIPOC kids. My high school and junior high were both overwhelmingly white; with a smattering of Black kids as well as a heaping handful of kids from families of Asian heritage. My home state of WV doesn’t have a huge non-white population, so there were just not that many instances or occasions where I was out of my (white) element.

That all changed in Greensboro. As we gathered for the standard convention meet and greet, I quickly and finally made the connection that West Virginia State University was a HBCU and we were in a conference with other HBCUs and I was for the first time one of a very few white folks in a large crowd of Black and Brown faces. Thankfully, I’m painfully and almost embarrassingly extroverted - my parents often said that I’d never met a stranger - as my teammates who had participated the year before made their rounds saying “hi” to folks they knew from previous years, I followed along and introduced myself around. By the end of the weekend, I’d made plenty of friends and my teammates and I had qualified for the national competition in Los Angeles. I looked forward to seeing some folks again in June and set my intentions to study and prepare for the BIG event. When we got home, my teammates and I set up a new schedule to meet and practice and assigned each other subjects to bone-up on. I needed a serious influx of Black history, so I volunteered to prep those subjects. I spent plenty of time in the library filling out index 

It shouldn’t be a controversial statement that Black history in America is woefully under-taught in the majority of our nation’s schools. It seems every year there is at least one story of a school district adopting textbooks that whitewash the horrific treatment of BIPOC since basically the moment Europeans touched American soil. I was underprepared.
My sophomore year, I took a 200 level African American History class primarily to bolster my knowledge for competition and secondarily to fill in the gaps my public education left me with.

I’m very proud of my time on the HCASC team. I learned a lot, I had a fabulous time every single year, and I made some dear friends for life. I’m also very proud to be an alumna of a HBCU - I love that I have this tenuous connection to so many amazing people merely by having attended and graduated from an HBCU. I am thankful that my time on the HCASC team pushed me to learn about people and subjects that were largely ignored in my public school education.

Look, it’s hard to write about this time and these experiences without sounding like I am offering myself up as a White Girl Who Knows. I’m not. I was merely fortunate enough to find myself among some great folks with whom I shared a specific set of skills and interest as well as an almost unbreakable habit of answering in the form of a question when the competition got fierce. That seemed enough of a common ground for just about everyone. Between rounds and during meals we were just a bunch of geeky young adults with healthy self-confidence swapping mix-tapes.