What's Up with The Student Segregation?

Going to a home basketball game is considered a USC Aiken tradition that all students must partake in… so why don’t we sit together?

In my personal experience, I didn't attend my first basketball game until my sophomore year and was completely unaware of the unspoken rules that everyone knows of. My friend and I arrived early and sat close to the front out of fear of not being able to get any good seats. But the turnout was small. This was the first time I realized that the women’s team doesn’t have the same amount of support from students as the men’s team does.

Once the women’s game ended, crowds of people started to rush in and the section I was sitting in became filled with students. But even then I realized that the Black students were all sitting in a completely different area. Before my experience, I didn’t understand why there were two separate student sections, especially by race.

The students in the section that I was sitting in were very loud, rowdy and messy since their food and drinks were being spilt in the stands due to their attitudes toward the men’s game. Along with this, the Black students in the other section were staring at us because we completely stuck out and obviously didn’t know what we were in for.

After speaking to some people around me I learned that the student section has always been this way simply just because the percentage of Black students isn’t large and they feel more comfortable together. These students come dressed to the nines to support student-athletes, take Instagram pictures in the infamous upstairs area and spend time with their peers but while doing all of this, they’d rather sit away from the chaos.