They Said This Would Be Fun
Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up
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4.3 • 44 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A powerful, moving memoir about what it's like to be a student of colour on a predominantly white campus.
A booksmart kid from Toronto, Eternity Martis was excited to move away to Western University for her undergraduate degree. But as one of the few Black students there, she soon discovered that the campus experiences she'd seen in movies were far more complex in reality. Over the next four years, Eternity learned more about what someone like her brought out in other people than she did about herself. She was confronted by white students in blackface at parties, dealt with being the only person of colour in class and was tokenized by her romantic partners. She heard racial slurs in bars, on the street, and during lectures. And she gathered labels she never asked for: Abuse survivor. Token. Bad feminist. But, by graduation, she found an unshakeable sense of self--and a support network of other women of colour.
Using her award-winning reporting skills, Eternity connects her own experience to the systemic issues plaguing students today. It's a memoir of pain, but also resilience.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As this eye-opening memoir proves, if you don’t fit in with the crowd, going to a “party school” can be far from a celebration. Journalist Eternity Martis grew up in racially diverse Toronto, and was excited to attend London’s famously fun Western University. But when Martis discovered she was one of only a handful of Black students in the entire school…well, the title pretty much sums up her higher-ed experience. As she encounters everything from classmates who want to touch her hair to white kids in blackface at a Halloween party to verbal abuse hurled by complete strangers, the constant grind and aggression start to completely drain her energy. Martis adds context to her personal stories with fascinating, maddening statistics and case studies about racism in modern life, reminding us that her own experiences are part of a much bigger and systemic problem. Shocking, enlightening, and shot through with a kind of grim humour, They Said This Would Be Fun is a vitally important portrait of institutional racism in action.
Customer Reviews
Great insight into how is campus life in Canada!
I think this book was a great insight into campus life in Canadian universities. This memoir shares the unique experience of a woman going to Western University in London, Ontario in Canada. While I didn’t go to the same university nor shared similar experiences she did, it’s great to have the perspective of a black woman in a small town less diverse, the lens of the campus life for a woman with different experiences in interracial relationships and attending class. She is also biracial from Pakistani and Jamaican background. This unique blend of navigating multiculturalism from both cultures is quite interesting. I will definitely pass this book along to the youth thinking about going out of town for university studies.
#canadianuniversities #interracial #beingblackinuniversity