Berkley Browne, M.A., CWP
Director of Student Success
Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
What do you want others to understand about your identity?
I think it's important for people to understand, that as a black queer woman, all of my identities exist together at the same time and that there isn't a hierarchy for me. It's not that I'm a woman first, a black person first, or a queer person first, all of these identities exist on the same level of significance for me all the time.
Depending on what's going on in my life, there may be one of those facets that is being activated more than others. For example, if someone says something that's homophobic that might activate a queer identity, more so than a woman identity. By the same token, that's all getting activated from this position of being black and a woman and queer.
The other piece, socioeconomics. Something that I think about often is the ways in which my experience as someone who has a lot of economic privilege, professional privilege, as well as academic privilege, shapes my experience as a black queer woman compared to another woman who isn't in the same socioeconomic position or academic position as I am.
Berkley and friends
How has diversity and inclusion or lack thereof on campus shaped or hindered your growth as an individual?
I think in a lot of ways diversity has shaped me as a professional. In terms of the institutions I've experienced, OU is the most outspoken about its desire to be an inclusive place and to affirm many different types of people.
College days
I was in undergrad in the 90s and I went to a small liberal arts college. The experience back then of being often the only black person in any of my classes, to now being a professional at a university campus is astonishing. Especially where the language and symbolism permeates from the president down and there is a desire for diversity and inclusion. This is something that I think is very much a value at OU.
Over the last five years that I've been here, my perception is that OU is in the process of figuring out what's the most effective way to achieve that desire on a consistent basis, depending on which element of diversity or which groups of students are being talked about. Everything from what kind of training do people need, to what do we need to be aware of in terms of the community in which OU exists in order to make that desire a consistent reality for everybody.
So in watching all of that, as a professional, I've been able to learn a lot about the importance of balancing symbolic language and the practical application of some of those symbols look like in the day to day experience.
Where do you feel uncomfortable and/or unsafe being yourself?
Where do you feel you do not belong on campus?
From a physical safety standpoint, I wouldn't say there's anywhere on campus that I don't feel safe. I think if we're talking about emotional safety, sometimes within my experience as a student in classroom settings, there have been challenges. Not so much from university faculty, but more from other students. Specifically in peer to peer interactions where it has been communicated that it's not safe to be out, in the context of a classroom discussion.
An Oakland University classroom
I think it's not so much specific locations, so much as it is in certain types of meetings or classroom experiences. It can be very challenging to be the person holding up the mirror for others; yet that is a role that I think those of us who have any type of marginalized identity feel responsibility to do. I feel that responsibility, partially as a matter of self-respect and self-advocacy, but also because I am willing to have that conversation so that the students after me in the future don't have the same or similar experience.