Black Occidental students were invited by the Black Student Alliance (BSA) and Black Men’s Forum (BMF) to attend a Feb 1. joint cookout event at Ernest E. Debs Park alongside Black student organizations from the University of Southern California (USC), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Loyola Marymount University (LMU). The event was set to mark the beginning of Black History Month and a time for Black students to celebrate joy and community.
Zyair Hall (sophomore) said he played a key role in organizing and facilitating the event as a BMF social event officer, including gathering the permits to rent the space and helping to lead conversations with other schools.
“I was the main person in contact with the other Black affinity groups at LMU, USC and UCLA,” Hall said. “I served as the spokesperson for the Black Men’s Forum [at Occidental]. I knew some of them from previous experiences, so it was easy to coordinate with them.”
Hall said it was easy to get other students on board for the event, as there is a great desire for community togetherness, regardless of the size of each school.
“Everybody was pretty receptive to the idea,” Hall said. “They came to us about it, and I said, ‘This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time’ — bring Black college people together in a predominantly white area, especially at Oxy.”
Hall said the class of 2028 was on his mind when planning.
“College shouldn’t just be a one school thing, you should have multiple connections everywhere else, especially in a place like LA,” Hall said. “I feel like California has a lot of colleges, especially in the SoCal area. It was for us, but it was also so the freshmen could see there’s more to Black LA than just Oxy.”
Rayla Dominoe (sophomore) said she was among those in attendance that day. As a BSA E-board member, she said she was not directly involved in the planning, but did help to build up hype and excitement among Occidental’s community members. Dominoe said the event was extremely beneficial for her.
“I think this event was very necessary because it allows Black students at all these different campuses to connect to one other, and it even allowed for students from the same school to connect with each other,” Dominoe said. “It was a good way to facilitate a familial environment and make new connections that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.”
Dominoe said she was even able to pick up necessary community skills from her time at the event and learn them in an environment that she felt safe and comfortable in.
“[My favorite part of the day was] learning how to play spades for the first time, [because] I was able to learn in a safe environment,” Dominoe said. “Most Black people know, if you don’t know how to play spades, your Black card is called into question. My mom would always tell me ‘Never let people know you don’t know how to play spades because [that’s] dangerous.’”
Dominoe said the cookout fostered a lot of camaraderie among attendees.
“It was so funny seeing strangers and people that I recognize talking to one another like we all knew each other,” Dominoe said. “It was great.”
Fasika Bekele (sophomore) said she was also present at the event and felt very strongly that it was a wonderful experience.
“It was honestly one of the best things I’ve been involved in ever since I came to Oxy,” Bekele said. “I feel like I got so [many] friends that day. I met so many people that I can both learn from networking and career-wise [and] also friend-wise. [There were] just a whole bunch of people that you could connect to.”
Bekele said her favorite part of the day was a small moment of pure connection between her peers at Occidental.
“[My favorite moment] was taking pictures at the end,” Bekele said. “I feel like the Black community at Oxy has never done that before as a whole, I [liked] just that moment, the energy, the jokes we were cracking at the time. That’s definitely like a core memory engraved in my mind.”
Contact Shelby Kernisant at kernisant@oxy.edu
