Mitzie Hunter, UTSC alum and Canadian politician, explains how embracing the diversity of the UTSC student body allowed her to overcome some of her internalized biases as a young Black woman.
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You know as a child, you definitely, you notice that there weren’t very many you know others that looked like you, and sometimes in the school system you would face biases that you know were very challenging,
0:19
challenging to figure out as a child, because you know, you just wanna be treated like everybody else, and you’re not sure why you’re being treated differently.
0:29
And sometimes you internalize that, because you think, “Oh, maybe there’s something wrong with me.” However, I believe that by the time I had gone through high school and went to university, that’s one of the joys of being on campus, is that it was so diverse.
0:45
You had students that were there, we had international students. Scarborough campus was a very diverse campus, it was also a close-knit campus because of its size at the time. So you got to know people very easily, and then I was a student leader, you know
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doing things like bringing cultural mosaics together. [Maria laughs] So, I really had a very good experience within university. University taught me that, you know, the world is bigger,
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there’s a bigger platform for me, should I choose to step forward, and you know take some risks, and show leadership.
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Don’t let the your internalization, or what you think others think about who you are, or who a Black woman is
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limit your choices. I, actually, you know, I have come to see that the choices are infinite.
