Oni Blair & Deryle Richmond
Welcoming people of color: On StoryCorps, Oni Kay Blair talks to her friend and mentor Deryle Richmond - an associate director at the Memorial Student Center - about her experiences as a black student at Texas A&M in the late 1990s, and her work today as the leader of a nonprofit trying to improve public transportation access in Houston.
- [Oni] When I entered in 1998, so almost 20 years ago, my class was 1% black students and the university was about 1%. To put it in context there were about 45,000 full-time students at the time and so you would go across this massive campus and not see or experience anything that had anything to do with your identity. You look around you and you want to see people who look like you, because you identify with them and you want to look up to people and see that you can be that too. And when you don't see people who look like your represented background like yours, sometimes that can be very discouraging especially when you're in college. And so that made it difficult. By the same token, Texas A&M was very intentional about making the university welcoming, and it was going through a period when it was recognizing that some of these challenges hadn't been addressed. So there was a multicultural student center and an orientation for students from under-represented background. And I went to that orientation before I ever started school, and they helped students who were coming in as freshman at that time to navigate the school and to find allies and find places where if you didn't feel comfortable or something happened, you knew you could go to for help or just somebody to make you feel like you were at home. And as I grew in my time here, people were very welcoming. I may be the first black student that they've ever had in class or that they saw in a leadership position on campus, and that became a talking point and an opportunity to engage people in a way that they hadn't been before. That changed my experience here, and I think that's what makes me look back on my time here so fondly.
- [Deryle] I hear some through-line to what you do now.
- [Oni] Today I work as an executive director of Link Houston. It's a non-profit that is focused on equity in transportation in the Houston region. And the whole point of it is to advocate so that people who are under-resourced can have access and the benefits of transportation options, be that a sidewalk or a bike path or public transit or car ride share but they actually work and work for them. I know how important having transportation options is to getting to education or getting a job.
- [Deryle] Why in Houston?
- [Oni] There's something very special about Houston. It's not just a large city. It is a place that I have loved because I find that it's not only diverse, but the social mobility has diversity to it. You could be poor, you could be a billionaire, you could be a millionaire, you could be middle class, you could be working middle class, you could be anything and be from any background, and I've probably've met people from every background who are somewhere across the socio-economic ladder. That doesn't happen usually in other cities, and I think that there's something very powerful about that. The city's incredibly diverse, and with one in four persons now being foreign-born in this city, it makes it a place that I think change is possible. And it also makes it a place that this is what the future is, why not start there on making the world a better place.
- [Oni] Yes. Your mentorship and guidance helped to stretch me and push me and continue to get more involved, and I'm so thankful that I met you, and you've had such an impact on my life.
- [Deryle] Oh, you're too kind.
- [Oni] It's true! It's totally true.