They Said This Would Be Fun

From award-winning journalist Eternity Martis, a look at race and gender on campuses, and a personal tale of struggle and survival.The debut memoir from Eternity Martis, They Said This Would Be Fun captures the difficulty of navigating through white spaces as a student of colour. Eternity thought going away to university would help her discover who she really is. Hoping to escape her abusive boyfriend, her nerdy reputation, her doting Pakistani family, and her complicated feelings towards her absent Jamaican father, she heads out to the predominantly white college city of London, Ontario. At school, she discovers an entitled culture of racism and sexism: she encounters blackface at parties, hears racial slurs at the bar, and has teachers ask her permission to discuss race in classrooms where she's the only student of colour. Over the next four years, Eternity navigates her identity in her new surroundings while adjusting to student life: she bounces out the...