In his new book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes almost dreamily about the Mecca for black education in this country, Howard University. In the midst of a passage on his time there, Coates takes the reader on a pleasant tour of The Yard, the central greenspace set against the eastern sky, on hilltop high, where women (or rather, “girls”) are initially described by their attire:

There were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the high-yellow progeny of AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses.

Though my time at Howard was a few years after his, the same types (and maybe some of the same actual people) were there when I was at the Mecca, too. I was a California girl who — if not born anew — at least learned how to be black at Howard University. When I say black, I mean that I learned to understand the deep DNA of a blackness that Coates invokes so beautifully when he rhetorically asks his son to consider the question “How do I live free in this black body?”

But what I didn’t know then — what I’ve only recently understood — is that I was learning blackness, this specific, thrumming, lung-filling, American blackness, from women. My mother isn't American; she taught me how to cook amazing Jamaican food and how to sew and quizzed me on math and praised my middle school newspaper movie reviews and told me stories of her mother killing chickens in di ya'd and late-night crab boils on the beach and writes "Many Happy Returns" on my birthday card every year. But she didn't and couldn't teach me the trappings of American blackness.

And by “black,” I don't mean genetically — obviously, Dolezals of the world aside, having parentage of African descent qualifies one as black. And by “black,” I don’t mean accepting of violence or “hood” culture. Coates describes the fear he grew up with in 1980s and 1990s Baltimore, not as a sign of cultural blackness, but as a symptom of trying to live free in a world that would rather you did not. There is nothing inherently “black” about violence, whether it comes from the streets or from parents trying to save their children from those streets.

At Howard, my college friends would tease, "Shani, you aren't really black," because I preferred to listen to The Postal Service and read Sinclair Lewis and because I didn't know how to wrap my hair, or dance to “Nolia Clap” at a humid, dark house party, or say "nigga" with that specific, practiced ease. But college is for learning, and I learned how to do those things, fairly quickly and I learned them from women.

But those superficial things aren’t blackness either. It was through a deeper knowledge of the wide swath of blackness present at the Mecca, that I began to understand that which was only possible in a place where nearly everyone else, from the president to the groundskeepers, was also in a black body. This, at least, is how it worked for me. Blackness is something ineffable, tied up in pride and understanding of oneself; it’s urgency and ambition; it’s feeling an ease that’s only possible in a place where self-segregation took away (most, though not all of) the self-doubt imposed on us by racism and by race. Black people re-create this feeling in different places, from church to the club to grad chapter meetings.

When I was at Howard, the most frequently (jokingly) thrown around figure was that the freshman class was 7 to 1, women to men. Official numbers are somewhere around 65% female to 35% male. The sheer number of women on campus meant their influence was felt from all sides. Women were in student government leadership roles; women edited the student newspaper, The Hilltop; long beautiful lines of sorors celebrated themselves with chants and party walking; classes where women spoke up and weren’t in the habit of being talked over by men, well-dressed, well-heeled women who were trained to chase career success just as much as love.

Central to the black woman’s struggle to live free is to find professional fulfillment. I didn’t need to read a study saying that 22% of black women want to hold powerful positions at work (compared to 8% of white women); all I have to do is take a brief survey of the women I went to school with. They’re stunningly ambitious, deeply driven, and surprisingly entrepreneurial when they hit a ceiling — after all, in 2002, only 5.3% of managers were black women.

I learned how to be black from women, and it's with disappointment but not surprise that I report, having enjoyed Coates' book, and read the reviews that have followed, that the black male experience is still used as a stand in for the black experience.