People told Loren LoRosa that going to an HBCU would cost her a good job. Her own mother, meaning no harm, told her to go to the big city and the big school instead. LoRosa went to Delaware State, and the thing she wants understood now is not that she beat the odds.
“I’m not the exception,” she said. “This is normal.”
LoRosa is 33, is on “The Breakfast Club,” and was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. She says the first week on the Delaware State campus answered a question she had been carrying. “There are a lot of Black young people who are great and want to be great,” she said. “We just don’t have the microphones we deserve to have yet.”
That is the argument, and it runs against the way these stories are usually told. The standard version makes one woman remarkable and leaves everyone she came up with as background. LoRosa is saying the talent was never the scarce thing. The platform was.
“We are multifaceted. We are successful,” she said. “We don’t need to be told we are articulate because, yeah, we are.”
She credits the small city for the habit. Wilmington taught her how to become a big fish in a small pond, she said, which is a different skill from waiting for a bigger pond to notice you. The microphone she has now is the one she thinks the rest of them are owed.
