Janean Cuffee is a senior basketball player studying applied psychology at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. In three seasons, she surpassed 1,000 career points and was named to the All-Association first team each of the past two seasons before COVID-19 canceled the 2020-21 season. Cuffee has taken the lead on NYU developing a student-athlete of color group.
The UAA “Conversations About Race and Racism” series seeks to lift the voices of people of color and recognize the challenges faced in both athletics and academics at the collegiate level. By sharing personal stories, we hope to elevate the conversation about race to raise awareness and bring about change.
Lack of Diversity
“I was already thinking about the dynamic of race when I decided to go to NYU. My first year was the most diverse team we’ve had. Kayla Patterson (who graduated in 2018) was like a big sister to me and I was so excited to join the team. I came from a boarding school, which was not very diverse, but fun. I saw NYU as a multicultural university with a large team,” Cuffee recalled. “Once that class graduated, the only Black players were me and one other woman, who quit. That left me as literally the only Black player left on the team. I talked to Kayla about it, and we acknowledged that it is harder to get a diverse team when the school doesn’t offer athletic scholarship money.”
The NYU athletics programs were physically spread out even before the Coles Sports and Recreation Center, its main facility, closed in February 2016, making its “home” basketball court at another school. “I would only see other athletes passing by. My roommate, a soccer player, played her home games at another college, which took me an hour to get to from campus by public transportation to see her play. That is just the way of New York City and NYU, not race-driven, but that we have limits between our sports in general,” she expressed. “I knew there were other Black student-athletes, but there is no platform to get to know them apart from what we are trying to do with BLAC (the name several other UAA schools have used to define their student-athlete groups of color). We ordinarily spend so much time in the gym and training room that we may just see another Black athlete to sometimes make eye contact and give a head nod.”
“Without seeing other teams very often, I didn’t realize how small the Black student-athlete population at NYU was until I started creating BLAC. I found only 45 Black/Latinx student-athletes, consisting of about eight percent of all athletes,” she communicated. “Reflecting back on my experience in academics and athletics, I have seen it is hard to create a massively diverse community. There are far more people of color in my classes. The university itself is more diverse than athletics.”
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