The words “inclusive” and “diverse” don’t exactly spring to mind with the mention of the two top universities in the country. But once in a blue moon, a story about the achievements of the few black students who have managed to make it in trickles through the constant wave of reports which suggest such a thing is almost impossible.
Patrick Sylla’s freestyle video on that very topic is one such example. Determined to demonstrate that being offered a place at Cambridge as a black student isn’t necessarily unattainable, the third-year Materials Science undergraduate decided to do a freestyle on his own experiences as a mixed-race Cambridge student.
Standing in front of King’s College, Sylla opens his What’s It Like freestyle with a question that’s plagued him for years since arriving on campus three years ago: what’s it like to be a Cambridge student and to be black, all at the same time?
Google “Cambridge University black”, and you’ll probably get an answer that’s starkly different to Sylla’s. “Oxford and Cambridge universities accused of ‘social apartheid’ over failure to offer places to black students”, screams one headline. “Racism, a fear of not fitting in, and insane competition: Why there's still a chronic lack of black students at Oxford and Cambridge” reads another. Both of which are sentiments that Sylla believes would have deterred him from applying in the first place, had he accepted them as a universal truth.
“I think if I'd seen no positive stuff from black people here I'd be like, this clearly isn't the place for me”, says Sylla, who was raised in a single-parent household in Hounslow, and didn’t achieve impressive grades until he went to college and summoned the motivation to up his academic performance.
“It's not about having less people who have had bad experiences sharing that, I think it's about having more people who have had good experiences sharing that as well”, he explains.
Before applying for Cambridge, a well-meaning teacher suggested to Sylla that places like Oxbridge weren’t the best places to go if you were black. “He said that he wouldn't encourage people to go to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge because he thought they would face discrimination or wouldn’t fit in there. And I think that was on my mind because he hadn't gone to Cambridge and didn't have much information about it, so I think the only place that he was really getting it from was the media representation of the university”.
Other black Cambridge students have expressed similar concerns over the years. Last year, in a similar effort to Sylla’s, a Facebook post by 14 black male undergraduates by Cambridge ACS said: “Young black men don't grow up thinking they'll make it here. They should.” The group wanted to show that the stereotype of what a Cambridge student should look and act like was just that – a stereotype.
“Even when I'm in London – and this has happened to me so many times – when people ask what uni I go to and I say Cambridge, they'll either be like: ‘you're lying', or they'll be like, 'yeah, yeah. But which Cambridge do you mean?'” says Sylla.
“I've even had someone say: 'how do you do physics at Cambridge with hair like that?' So, clearly [black people] don’t fit in with how the world perceives Cambridge students”.
While racism and historic problems with offering black students places at the University are persisting issues – Sylla himself is emphatic that not all black students will have had the luxury of avoiding racist encounters, or being discriminated by way of their gender, sexuality and ability alongside their blackness – for Sylla, the suggestion that all black students at Cambridge are subject to the same fate is an oversimplification of the myriad experiences that they can have.
“Every person's experience is different,” he adds. “I would hate for my freestyle to be perceived like I was trying to say that [black people] shouldn't talk about their encounters, because of course [they] should. And I would hate for my video to be used to silence anyone. I just think it all needs to be discussed.”
Some students have suggested that neglecting to mention the negative aspects of the Cambridge experience could amount to misleading prospective students – a possibility that Sylla, who agrees that experiences at Cambridge are broader than his as a “cis, heterosexual man”, never intended to be the case. “It would be awful to be like, it's great here, you won't experience any racism, because for some people that is a real reality. I have the utmost respect for people who have written articles and talked about their experiences here”, he says, and suggests that conversations like these could see more state school educated black people like him trying their hand at applying.
“At school, they had people who would kind of go through the application process [to attend Cambridge], but I wasn't one of them. I wasn't in that group. But I didn't see why I couldn't be, because I started working and was like, I can get these grades. And once I did, I didn't think it was going to be a bad thing before coming”.
Now that Sylla’s time at Cambridge is coming to an end, the science student-cum-rapper has plans to work in the media in some capacity, which he admits is a world away from science. As well as making videos in order to provide educational resources to students outside of Cambridge, Sylla has been dipping his toe into the world of stand-up as part of the Cambridge University Footlights BME Smoker. It’s safe to say this probably won’t be the last time we hear from him.
