In the first weeks of the academic year, many Black Princeton students noticed that what little presence they expected from their demographic was even lower than they had imagined. Those students looked around and asked each other… “Where are all the Black people at?!”

Their observations were accurate. The Black student population decreased from around 9% in the Class of 2028 to 5% in the Class of 2029, the lowest it has been since 1968, four years after the Civil Rights Act was passed.  

To get their perspectives, I spoke to four Black underclassmen about what it means to be Black at Princeton today. 

Princess Fodeke ‘28, from Hahira, Georgia, is a member of the Mathey College Council, the Black Student Union (BSU), the Edwards Arts Collective, and serves as Social Media Manager of the Food Bank Express. 

Coming from a town of just over 3,000 people, she discussed how being from a rural area motivated her to apply to Princeton. “I wanted access to better opportunities that an Ivy League School could provide,” she said. 

Fodeke expressed her views on the necessity of being herself as a Black student on campus. She’s concerned about the future of the Black community at Princeton. 

To Fodeke, Blackness at Princeton could mean many things. “But for me, it’s just doing what I do here, because I am Black,” she said. “That, to me, is being Black at Princeton: going through extracurriculars… as myself, not changing who I am.” 

Although assured in her identity, Fodeke stressed that it has been “disheartening to see [the] decline in the Black population recently.” She added, “It’s hard to decide what to attribute it to, because our year was the year they got rid of affirmative action, but we still had similar percentages of Black people to previous years.” In contrast, the Class of 2029 “had a stark decrease.”

Affirmative action policies began during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, concurrent with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the specific purpose of giving Black Americans the opportunity to catch up in the workforce and in education. Programs were under the watch of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); other minorities were later added as recipients of these benefits. But in June 2023 — the year that most of the Class of 2028 applied — the Supreme Court reversed the policies in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina.

Fodeke added that she hopes to see some sort of alternative to affirmative action emerge from Princeton in the future to combat the waning numbers that have been reported. But that future is not guaranteed. “We’ll have to see,” Fodeke said. 

Torey Bullock ‘28, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is Community Outreach Chair of the Generational African-American Students’ Association (GAASA), active in BSU, and University Relations Chair of the Princeton Progressive Law Society (PPLS).

Given his connection to affinity groups and social justice work on campus, Bullock expressed concern that affinity group involvement may suffer. “With funding for [student] groups changing and decreasing for affinity groups, there has to be a change in how affinity groups try to collect funding for different events,” he said. 

Budget cuts of 5-10% across various University programs have impacted student life in many ways, including the end of Wintersession. Surprisingly, though, funding for different student groups has been left largely unchanged. To avoid the budget cuts impacting campus life, the university has increased the funding of the Projects Board, ODUS’s primary funding source for Student Groups, by $20,000. The impact on affinity groups has yet to be reported.

Bullock speculates that lower populations will lead to a lack of a meaningful presence on campus: “[We] would have to change the whole structure of things so that we can create a stronger black community… So I think [there will] definitely have to be a change, and it’s definitely going to be a challenge because of the low population.”

Emmanuele Gerratana ‘29, from Atlanta, Georgia, expressed that she has found her community in multiple ways on campus by interacting with others from the Atlanta metropolitan area, playing French Horn for the Wind Ensemble, and participating in affinity groups such as the Princeton African Students Association (PASA), BSU, and GAASA. 

Gerratana said that the noticeable decline in Black student enrollment concerned her, “especially since I believe education to be a right, [including] higher education.” 

Gerratana’s views seem concurrent with the original purpose of the Affirmative Action policies, stressing that “There shouldn’t be any factors barring you from pursuing higher education.” She believed this ought to be the case, given the strong emphasis on higher education in the job market.

Gerratana’s concerns reflect another potential future decline outside of the classroom. “If these institutions continue to decrease their Black enrollment,” she said, “We are going to see a stark decrease in Black professionals in our workforce, [and] this cycle is gradually going to continue.”

Gerratana also feels that the university could do more to set a precedent that they and other higher education institutions should be committed to having demographics that are more reflective of the country, “and do more for those students when they are in these institutions to make them feel welcome.” 

To Gerratana, inclusion is a necessity. “If we are going to pride ourselves on a diverse campus with admits from all 50 states or multiple countries, then we need to do everything we can to make those students truly feel at home here,” she said.

Kobi-Skye Padgett ‘29 is a student-athlete on the Track & Field team from Tampa, Florida. Being from the South was the main motivation to apply to schools in the Northeast, leading her to Princeton. She is also a member of Vote100 and BodyHype Dance Company. 

Referring to what the recent decline in Black students says about the state of the country, Padgett said, “It says that we are not committed as a country to maintaining diversity, under the guise of racial fairness.” 

Padgett suggested that the country’s history of racism has had lasting impacts on the Black community. She challenged what she saw as the University’s parting from combating those impacts. “Black students can come here, have more opportunities, gain education, uplift their families,” she said. “If we, as a country at large, aren’t seeking to uplift, it just shows how we use racial bias when it’s beneficial for some.”

She added that “Race has been so determining of economic, social, and educational outcomes for the entirety of our country.” Given this history, she thinks that the University should use racial identity “as a consideration because the country wasn’t created on fairness,” she said. “To now pretend like everyone’s fair… or there should be equality and not equity, seems distorted.” 

Following the Supreme Court decision to remove affirmative action, the students I’ve interviewed and many other Black students on campus say to each other, “No one is coming to save us.” According to them, this conclusion can mean two things: that some Black students may see no point in applying to Princeton, or that the ones who are here already will feel unsupported. Investments in and actionable change for Black people and all marginalized groups in the United States are no longer coming from the Federal Government and are not guaranteed ever to return. But many Princetonians feel like that fact is unjust.

“It would be silly to discount the hundreds of years of historical [and] racial traumas that have led us to the current moment,” Padgett said. “To now be in a position where we’re looking to say that race can’t be considered as a factor for admission seems wrong, because race has been a primary factor in determining our history as a country.”