ENGW 103 Portfolio
A curated selection of essays and papers from my freshman writing seminar at Howard University, each piece accompanied by a reflection on what I learned as a writer.
Author's Introduction
This was my first real paper at Howard, and I wanted to write about something I actually live every day. I'm a JRA, so I spend my nights helping other students hold it together, but nobody really asks who's holding me together. The gym is that answer, and I wanted to explain why it's not just about getting bigger. When we read Emily Doe's Stanford witness statement in class, that line about wanting to take off her body like a jacket genuinely stopped me. It connected to something I'd been feeling but couldn't name yet: the gym is where I put my body back on. That contrast between her experience and mine became the center of this paper. I'm proud of this piece because it's the most honest thing I've written. The closing line about wearing my body like armor came out in one draft and I never changed it. That's how I knew the paper was done.
It seems like there's always a knock at 10PM. Occasionally it's a student locked out of his or her room, occasionally it's a noise issue, and frequently, it's someone who simply can't take the pressure of freshman year at Howard anymore and they need someone to talk to. As a Junior Resident Advisor (JRA), I'm that person. Steady hand, conflict resolver, older brother. I put on a face, the calm, authoritative, "I've got this" face, and I take care of it. However, most times, I'm internally shaking with the same anxiety as they are. When I'm trying to complete assignments in my Physics and Computer Science classes, when I'm dealing with the social pressures of campus life, and when I have to worry about an entire floor of students I'm responsible for, I feel like I'm running multiple tabs in a web browser. The fan is spinning, the computer is slowing down, and all I would need is a single "knock, knock, knock" from another resident needing my help, and my system would crash.
When the noise at home becomes overwhelming, I do not go to the library or attend a party. I go to the gym.
The weight room is my sensory reset. The air smells different in that place. Metallic, sharp, slightly like rubber or sweat. That is the smell of working out. In the weight room I hear the rhythmic clanging of weights and the hum of the treadmill instead of the chaos from outside my door. My focus for the next ninety minutes will be on nothing but gravity and my refusal to let it win.
Bodybuilding is often misunderstood as a mere vanity pursuit, lifting weights to develop large muscles and show off your physique when wearing a shirt. However, for myself and many other guys that find solace in the gym, it is a mental and physical discipline. I do not simply "pick things up and put them down." Rather, I am always researching. I spend countless hours studying, such as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (the growth of the volume of the sarcoplasmic fluid within the muscle cell) versus myofibrillar hypertrophy (the growth of muscle density). I track what I consume in terms of macronutrients, I evaluate how well I execute each exercise, and I approach my body as if it were a physics problem since it is the only variable in my life that I have control over. The variables are: I eat X amount of protein, and I lift Y amount of weight, Z is the resulting outcome from this. It is fair. It is a direct relationship. In a world where you can work hard on a test and still fail it, or you can be a good person and yet be treated unfairly, the fairness of working out is grounding.
The reason this desire to have control over my physical form has become so important to me is because I felt such a deep sense of haunting when reading "The Stanford Witness Statement," written by Emily Doe. In her victim-impact statement, Doe recounts the traumatic events of the sexual assault that occurred against her by Brock Turner, where she describes the devastating moment that she realized her body was no longer hers but had been used as an object, a crime scene, and a piece of evidence in a court of law. The trauma caused a severing of her attachment to her own skin. In one of the saddest parts of the text, she states:
"I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don't want my body anymore. ... I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else."
When I read this line, I literally had to lay my paper down on the desk. That line spoke to me in terms of my own nightmares about body autonomy loss, not specifically related to her traumatic experience, but because it clearly communicates the ultimate nightmare of being unable to control your body. Doe expressed a desire to get out of the body that had become so vulnerable and cage-like. She wanted to un-zip her skin and leave it behind as the world had shown her that she could be raped or abused.
The concept of "taking off" for me does not relate to my views on fitness at all. Rather than stripping fat from my body, I view my workouts and diet as an opportunity to protect my body. Each workout, set, rep, and research-based meal. All of it represents an attempt to claim back some level of control that the world has taken away from me. As a young Black male, I recognize how society often looks at my body through the lens of stereotype, sometimes as a threat, other times as a product to be sold. There are fewer opportunities for me to have full control over my body, but when I train, I do have this opportunity. When I'm working out, I am building a barrier. I am involved in a voluntary self-construction, which opposes the voluntary self-surrender that was covered in the AI readings. I am not giving up anything, I am taking charge.
Doe's tragic experience demonstrates specifically why I believe that the fitness discipline plays an important role for my mental health. She illustrates how fragile my freedom to choose how I will live my life is, and how easily I can lose the sense of security and empowerment that comes with having control over my body. When she describes the sensation of pine needles scratching her skin and the void that she feels, she is referring to an invasion of her body. When I feel lactic acid burning or my muscles expanding through the process of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, I am experiencing an occupation of my body by myself fully and completely.
I often hear people discuss mental health and physical health as two different areas in which we are either going to the therapist for our mind, or we're going to the gym for our body. For myself, however, there is no separation. I cannot physically survive the demands of Howard, the expectations of my residents, nor the overwhelming chaos of the world without having a physical base to provide an anchor. The discipline I find from working out provides me with the reminder that I am capable of change, that I can withstand pain or discomfort, and that I am ultimately the one who is responsible for my own decisions and choices, the "captain" of this ship. I do not want to remove my body like a coat. I want to wear it like armor.
Author's Introduction
I chose Drake because the Kendrick beef was everywhere when I was writing this and everyone had an opinion, but nobody was really asking the deeper question: why does hip-hop decide who's allowed in based on where they grew up instead of what they actually make? That question matters to me because I've been in rooms where people tried to tell me what I am and what I'm not based on how I look or where I come from. This paper taught me how to build an argument using sources that actually talk to each other. I pulled from Pitchfork reviews, academic journals, Michael Eric Dyson, and Drake's own lyrics, and I had to figure out how to make all of those voices support one point without losing my own. My professor pushed me to bring more of myself into the writing, which I tried to do in the closing. That last line about Drake's refusal to fake who he is being the most real thing about him is really about how I see authenticity in general.
Old-school hip-hop has always defined what it means to be an artist by their background. Artists like Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. built their reputations on narratives of poverty and street survival, and Jay-Z's credibility came from his story of hustling in Brooklyn's Marcy Projects. As long as an artist could prove they were poor enough, close enough to crime, and masculine enough, they were accepted as authentic. But when Drake entered the industry, his early sound was nothing like that. He leaned into emotional vulnerability and mixed R&B melodies with rap verses, talking about relationships and personal insecurities instead of street narratives. In an interview with the Village Voice, Drake said, "I mean, I'm so light that people are like 'you're white,'" which shows that his emotional openness was not some marketing decision but came directly from the identity confusion he dealt with his entire life. Yet in 2015, with the release of If You're Reading This It's Too Late, critics like Pusha T and later Kendrick Lamar started publicly questioning whether Drake had earned his place in hip-hop, even though he holds the record for the most Billboard Hot 100 entries of any artist in history. By popularizing a melodic rap sub-genre rooted in his own reality, Drake rewrote the rules of the hip-hop canon, but his success is constantly dragged down by critics who use his biracial, middle-class background against him. Really, the gatekeeping in hip-hop has less to do with musical quality and more to do with enforcing a narrow racial and socioeconomic identity, and Drake's career shows just how contradictory that thinking is.
What made Drake's rise work was that his genre-blending actually felt natural. The professional review of If You're Reading This It's Too Late by Craig Jenkins in Pitchfork notes the project is "best enjoyed as an exercise in the casual excellence of the artist as rhymer and purveyor of hooks." Drake has also pulled from international styles in his music. In an article for Across The Culture defending Drake against cultural theft allegations, accusations that got louder after he started using Caribbean sounds on tracks like "Controlla," Zander Tsadwa writes, "To scream 'cultural appropriation' as someone who isn't of an Afro-Caribbean identity when you hear 'Controlla' or when you see Drake tweet in patois is funny." Tsadwa explains that people have "rigid expectations of a popular artist once they're popular" and a "limited understanding of cultural exchange and identity." And honestly, Tsadwa has a point. Drake spent years in Toronto, which has one of the largest Caribbean diaspora communities in North America. Assuming he has no real connection to those sounds says more about how narrowly people view identity than it says about Drake.
The cultural theft accusations also feed into a bigger argument: that Drake is not just borrowing sounds but using the whole genre for profit. In The Philadelphia Citizen, Michael Eric Dyson writes about Drake and Kendrick Lamar's rivalry. Lamar goes directly at Drake on the track "Not Like Us," saying, "No, you not a colleague, you a... colonizer." Lamar uses the word "colonizer" to say that Drake treats hip-hop like something to profit off of, not something he actually belongs to. But that argument does not hold up when you look at the fact that Drake has been making hip-hop since he was a teenager, way before the fame and way before there was money in it for him. Calling someone a colonizer means they showed up from the outside, but Drake grew up inside the culture.
On top of that, Dyson notes that Drake has been called a "tribal impostor" and "bi-racial culture vulture." Dyson says the "rapid pace at which Drake was able to be labeled as not being authentically black reveals the boundaries that are established around race and the genres that are based upon it," and describes this as the "reactionary nativism of cults of pure identity that police the boundaries of Blackness." What Dyson is really talking about is a purity test, and it is one that no biracial person can ever pass. If being accepted in hip-hop means you have to be "fully" Black by somebody else's standard, then the genre is not actually celebrating Black culture. It is gatekeeping it.
Drake knows about this scrutiny, and he has addressed it himself. In "You & The 6," he raps:
"I used to get teased for being black / And now I'm here and I'm not black enough / Because I am not acting tough / Or making false stories bout where I'm actually from."
He gets criticized for not acting tough, which is what the traditional rap canon expects, but he is not going to make up a fake past just to satisfy those expectations.
Academics have studied this too, and the research backs up what Drake has been saying. In her article, "Musical Artists Capitalizing on Hybrid Identities: A Case Study of Drake the 'Authentic' 'Black' 'Canadian' 'Rapper,'" Amara Pope looks at how Drake deals with his complex identity. Pope writes that when Drake lived with his mom in Toronto, he was called "different" by the Jewish community and "too Black" by others. But then when he moved to Memphis to live with his father Dennis Graham, a drummer who played for Jerry Lee Lewis, he was around Black musicians all the time and still got called "Too White." As Pope puts it, "Hence, Drake cannot escape the prejudice of being labeled black or not black enough, nor ever being labeled fully white." That is the trap that biracial identity creates in a genre that is obsessed with racial purity. Wherever Drake goes, somebody tells him he does not belong. His music ended up being the one space where he could actually define himself on his own terms.
Drake's story matters because it goes beyond just one rapper's career. It is about who gets to be part of a culture and who gets to make that decision. The traditional hip-hop canon was built around a specific image, and if you do not match that image, people call you a fraud no matter how talented you are. Drake showed that the audience was ready for something else, that being emotional and melodic could work alongside commercial success. The fact that his race and his neighborhood got used against him shows something deeper about hip-hop: a genre that started from people who were shut out is now shutting people out using the same kind of thinking. As somebody who has dealt with my own questions about identity, I think Drake's refusal to fake who he is might be the most real thing about him.
Author's Introduction
This was the paper where I finally felt like I had my own voice fully on the page. My professor had been telling me all semester to bring more of myself into the writing, and this topic made that easy because I'm living it. I'm a first-year watching campaign season play out on the yard, scrolling Fizz at 2 AM reading debates about orgs I'm not even in yet. I wanted to write something that took the conversation seriously instead of just picking a side. That meant engaging with the real criticisms, the Kulture Magazine article, the Fizz posts with 1,400 upvotes, and the Brown Paper Bag history. I didn't want to pretend those problems don't exist. But I also wanted to show that the same orgs people criticize today are not the same orgs from 1930, and that selectivity, when it's based on character and service instead of skin tone, builds something real. Mixing Fizz posts with Du Bois was a risk but it felt right. The anonymous posts are where Howard students actually say what they think, and putting those next to a 1903 essay showed that this argument has been going on for over a century.
There is always one particular week in the fall semester at Howard when the yard completely transforms. Posters that weren't there yesterday suddenly appeared overnight. You can tell which students are members of a selective organization before they even introduce themselves. Model Inc walks around campus and the dining halls in their signature jackets, and they never seem to take them off. The Ladies of Quad roll deep in matching fits, moving together, and you already know which org they belong to before anyone says a name.
Then there are the Men of George Washington Carver, Incorporated, otherwise known as "The King$." Their three pillars are short and clean: Brotherhood, Manhood, Community Service. On @mogwcinc, their bio calls them "Freshman Organization of the Year Four Times Running." Their mission, in their own words, is to "push boys to become men." They bring in each class by number (K-10 is the tenth class of brothers) and unveil them at a Coming Out Ceremony that pulls a full crowd. For Black History Month they put Dr. King on their feed:
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
The selective organizations at Howard University (MOGWC, Ladies of Quad, and many of the modeling organizations like Model Inc) should stay selective. Selectivity doesn't make an org cruel. It's what makes the org worth joining in the first place. As soon as the bar drops, the prestige drops with it, and you're left with nothing worth earning. The Mecca did not get its reputation for being the "Mecca" by lowering the bar. A Fizz post from the last election cycle said it flat: "Yall be so surprised when the selective orgs are... selective." 362 upvotes, no further explanation needed.
This argument isn't new, and Du Bois wasn't just a theorist. W.E.B. Du Bois was the first Black man to earn a PhD from Harvard. He helped found the NAACP, and in that same year, he became an honorary member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. To this day, Alpha calls him their "spiritual inspiration." So when Du Bois wrote his 1903 essay "The Talented Tenth" and argued that civilizations don't get built from the bottom up, that the most capable rise first and then "pull all that are worth the saving" up with them, he was describing the exact kind of selective Black org he would later join. Look at who else came out of that same fraternity. Martin Luther King Jr. Thurgood Marshall. Paul Robeson. Edward Brooke, the first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Alpha Phi Alpha was founded at Cornell in 1906 and chartered its Beta chapter at Howard in 1907, nearly 120 years ago. Howard's own Alpha Kappa Alpha, founded in 1908, gave the country Vice President Kamala Harris. MOGWC, Ladies of Quad, the entire Divine Nine. They're all running a play Du Bois drew up over a hundred years ago. Call it gatekeeping if you want, but history keeps showing it produces leaders.
Not everyone agrees with that. A staff writer for Kulture Magazine argues selective cultures at historically black colleges and universities like Howard do more harm than good. The piece claims they isolate certain students and shut them out of the full HBCU experience. "Historically Black or Historically Harmful?" relies on personal accounts from students who felt excluded based on appearance and social connections, including one who said: "there's still a lot of genuine people at Howard but the school definitely has an elitism problem." The author seems to believe selectivity is a symptom of organizational toxicity rather than a feature of HBCU culture. And it isn't just the magazine. One anonymous Fizz post put it harder: "The selective orgs at Howard are horrible. Their selection process sucks, their hazing process is disgusting, and most of the people in it are entitled assholes." That post got 1,400 upvotes. That isn't a frustrated outsider. That's a Howard student seeing this play out on the yard right now.
Those stories are real, and they matter. But the article mashes two different things together. People being socially ostracized because of how they dress or who they hang around with isn't the same thing as an organization deciding who gets to join. MOGWC and the Ladies of Quad are looking for specific characteristics: character, commitment, and what each member brings to the table. Getting rejected by an org stings. That doesn't mean the process is broken. The org saying no is not the same as Howard saying no.
Selective HBCU orgs carry a real history. E.M. Price II has written about how many HBCUs and Divine Nine chapters functioned as "Brown Paper Bag Schools," places where skin tone decided who got through the door. That wasn't a rumor. It happened. But look at what those same orgs select for in 2026. Alpha Kappa Alpha's individual chapters use GPA cutoffs and campus leadership benchmarks. MOGWC names its three pillars out loud (Brotherhood, Manhood, Community Service) and unveils new brothers by class number, not by complexion. Imani Smith, the current president of AKA's Alpha chapter at Howard, told Fortune last year that what drew her in was the "level of service" the org showed on campus. That's a different test than the paper bag, and it produces a different product. The 1930s AKA chapter fought to make Black Americans eligible for New Deal jobs. The 2020s AKA chapter helped organize the campaign that made Kamala Harris Vice President. Same org. Different century. It got there by changing.
None of today's members were alive for the Brown Paper Bag era, and holding them responsible for it freezes the org in time. You can hold both things at once: the history was painful AND today is different. If we refuse to let institutions change, then no institution in America could ever claim to change. That's a trap.
Here's the part that usually doesn't get said: selective orgs are solving a real problem on this campus. One Fizz post, 555 upvotes, read simply: "I just feel like at Howard (outside of joining a selective org) it is so hard to make new friends once you're a junior. This is lonely." That post comes from someone who sees what the orgs actually build: community, on purpose, tight because the bar to get in is real.
Rejection hits, and nobody's pretending it doesn't. But getting cut from one of these orgs doesn't mean Howard rejected you. Howard already chose you when it sent you that acceptance letter. The org is just a second filter on top of that. When it says no, it isn't saying you don't belong at The Mecca. It's saying this one specific space isn't your space. That's a redirect, not a failure.
Selectivity isn't a flaw in Howard's system. It IS Howard's system. People fight to get here. People fight harder to get into the orgs once they're here. Both of those fights matter because the prize on the other side is real. This is my first year at Howard, and I've watched campaign season play out from the outside: the matching fits moving across the yard, the IG flyers dropping at midnight, the Fizz debates at 2 AM about organizations I'm not even in. The people who didn't make it are loud on the internet. The people who did are quiet on the yard and busy building. They're picking up where Du Bois left off in 1903 and walking it into a Coming Out Ceremony in 2026. The Mecca wasn't built on participation trophies and it surely won't survive if we start handing them out now.
Looking Back
I came into ENGW 103 thinking writing was something you get through, not something you get better at. My first paper was personal but safe. My second paper was research-heavy but my professor could tell I was hiding behind my sources instead of standing next to them. By the third paper I finally understood what she'd been asking for all semester: put yourself in the argument, not behind it. The biggest shift for me was learning that the strongest writing doesn't come from sounding smart. It comes from being specific. A Fizz post with 362 upvotes can do more work in a paragraph than a vague claim about "society." A line about lactic acid burning in your muscles says more about control than a paragraph explaining the concept. I'm a CS major, not an English major, but this class changed how I think about communication in general. Writing is just another way of building something, and the same rules apply: be precise, be intentional, and don't ship anything you wouldn't put your name on.