Nikaiya Lawson will never forget the day a tenured professor at UNC petted her dreads while she was putting art supplies away at the end of class. He rubbed his hands across her hair before walking away and giggling. In another instance, Lawson mentioned her love for heavy metal, only for the same professor to react with surprise, telling Lawson she looked like she “listened to reggae.”
For Black students like Lawson, treatment like this is more common than many would expect, especially at a place like UNC, a school that prides itself on being a safe space. The arts are generally expected to hold more progressive and accepting spaces, but sometimes, this isn’t the case at all. For Lawson and others, the arts, and UNC, aren’t always safe.
Lawson is a graduate student in UNC’s School of Art and Design, with a focus on printmaking and painting. However, Lawson’s first choice was an entirely different medium, one she felt forced to give up because of a series of microaggressions, and worse, from those in power…