“That change has made the black community so much more divided,” she said. “There’s a thought that black Americans aren’t good enough—you have to be an immigrant. It’s a new issue that’s emerging now.”

Valerie R. Dixon ’01 said that Harvard’s statistics on the number of black students at the College are misleading because black students come from disparate backgrounds.

“Individual students have the frustration of not having people to relate to,” she said. “I would relate more to my Midwestern white friends than to my black classmates.”

The alums also addressed how the dating scene at Harvard has changed for black women.

“I guess all the black guys had the book of pictures, so we [Radcliffe women] never wanted for dates,” Snowden said.

Romans, now associate director of admissions at Brown, said that during her years at Harvard there were a lot of discussions about interracial dating because there were 90 black women and only 48 black men—encouraging black women to consider dating people of other races.

“Discussions of interracial dating came up and there were some really tough conversations,” she said. “Were we just going to sit in our rooms?”