The Student Government candidates look great in their promotional photos all over your news feed. But as a student of the University of Texas, you want more than that.
Black students at the University of Texas at Austin are running a race with the past, and the dizziness reaches its peak every February during Black History Month.
Shannon Donaldson always knew that she wanted to do something unconventional with her life. The idea of a nine-to-five desk job was out of the question and so was doing anything other than living out a trade she was passionate about.
The luminous Rae Cosmetics studio sits on W. 2nd street in downtown Austin. Apart from the bright pops of color from the makeup, the interior of the studio is entirely white. Posters of athletes adorn the wall. A ballet dancer, a cyclist and a triathlete model the makeup, vouching for its resistance to heat and perspiration.
In reports, the walk is usually described as a 2.5-mile trek.
However, UT journalism professor Gene Burd does not have a GPS, nor does he use an iPhone to calculate the shortest distance from his apartment on Barton Springs Road to the Belo Center for New Media. He knows the streets as avenues for communication, not transportation, and chooses to take the long way around — to look at the City, note its changes, check all of the parking meters for loose change and stop for a chat with a lot attendant by the Capitol.
Sean Morgan’s mind wanders while he drives a flashy Lamborghini around the block of the tallest residential building in Texas. The 23-year-old University of Texas at Austin art student works as a valet for the sky-blue glass “behemoth” of a building, which looks out across Austin’s hills from the heart of downtown. Morgan is imagining a vivid party scene awaiting his return to the tower’s base, where “a fire hydrant is wrenched open and people are running through the torrent of water, hugging, slipping and swapping swigs of aged scotch and malt liquor.”
Children of immigrants are torn between two worlds, constantly seeking a middle ground to call home. They face the challenge of learning to fit in with their environment, while simultaneously upholding the culture of their ancestors. For the women of Nritya Sangam, the only traditional Indian dance troupe at the University of Texas at Austin, every day is a celebration of the past they refuse to let die.
