This text was contributed by Liz Rohan, a graduate student at the Center for Writing Studies, at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

The Detroit Metropolitan Area is very segregated. This and [the city's] racist history doesn't help to foster much integration or racial cooperation once members of the Detroit community attend college together. Or at least this was my experience more than ten years ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in the late 1980s. For my major, American Culture, I took several African American courses in which I "mingled" with African Americans, but I never really got to know any African Americans on a personal level. Fortunately, my sophomore year of college I did get to be friends with an African American woman in my French class; let's call her Deanna. Deanna and I bonded in this last semester of French, a class we both needed to complete the language requirement at the university. Neither of us were very good French students. Deanna's friend, who was also an African American woman, was a French star. Before and after class the three of us teased each other about our French skills, good and bad. Our T.A. wasn't very sympathetic to those who were having a harder time in the class, like Deanna and myself, a difficulty exacerbated by the fact that the course was accelerated. The class met three hours a day, four days of week--which translated to at least three hours of homework, on top of time spent in class. All in all, too much French. Deanna and I shared some homework during the semester and we studied together one afternoon.

On the last day of class, Deanna and I were ecstatic to be done with French and chatted on our way out of class. It was a gorgeous June day and I felt a great burden lifted from my shoulders. I didn't even care if I didn't pass the final exam, as long as I was done with French. As Deanna and I walked from class, we discovered that we both needed to get on a bus to go to North Campus, where she lived and where I worked.


As we walked toward the bus, Deanna passed a group of her friends all of whom were African Americans. Her friends, mostly guys, shouted various cryptic salutations to her as we passed them. Suddenly, it became very tense. It seemed to me that Deanna felt awkward and conflicted about walking past people she knew when she was with me. I assumed this was because I was white. As we got on the bus, and sat down next to one another, the tension thickened. Her friends outside the bus continued to shout things at her. They seemed friendly but they were obviously teasing her about something.

As we traveled the few miles to North Campus, Deanna told me that she didn't like Ann Arbor very much because there was "nothing to do." She was used to the city where there was always something going on. I nodded at her and she asked where I was from. I told her I was from Grosse Pointe (a white suburb directly outside of Detroit legendary for its property laws excluding blacks from buying property in its environments).

Deanna looked even more uncomfortable when she told me that her aunt had bought a house there, but eventually had to move after her property was vandalized by her neighbors.

I didn't know what to say to Deanna then. I think I said something to the effect that it was too bad there were people like that in Grosse Pointe. But not everybody was like that.