Scholar maintains cautious optimism

The first thing you must know about Colin Marts is that he makes his family very proud.

There is a lot to be proud of.

Even before he was given a choice between top universities like Harvard and Brown – which came looking for him – there was the class president thing.

A class presidency during each of his years at South Terrebonne High.

The academics – as the college offers attested – were far from shabby. Colin was a starter on the Gators football team and dabbled in basketball as well.

In his last year of high school, Colin was invited to study genetics for a six-week summer session at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And then there was the involvement with Future Leaders of America’s Gulf, a group of teens founded by former Vandebilt High School student Vinny Cannata, which was a lot of students getting together and seeking answers to the Gulf of Mexico’s future from political and business leaders. The group still exists.

With that organization, as others he has been involved with, Colin was not just a name on a sheet of paper. He literally got involved.

With all that achievement you’d think a kid like Colin might be stuck up, maybe might have a right to be. Wrong. Colin Marts is personable, down-to-earth and also has a sense of humor.

Vinny once described his enthusiasm as “infectious.”

The son of Bourg residents Ronald and Adrienne Marts, an internal medicine physician and a hospital office worker, respectively, Colin, who hails from Bourg, has been taught to be independent. Nothing, he has learned, should ever be just handed to you.

So Harvard, which as earned was Colin’s future and now is his present.

Oh, there is something else you need to know about Colin. Well, you didn’t need to know this until recently, because it didn’t matter.

Colin is black. The reason it matters recently appeared on his Facebook page.

“Earlier today, I passed a slowly walking white couple heading back to my room,” the post states. “I wasn’t the first to pass them, but I guess the most noticeable. I thought nothing of the first time the guy turned around to look at me. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being aware of your surroundings. However, the second time raised concern that even caused me to turn around. No one was behind me. He perceived me to be a threat. At that point, I realized how ironic the situation was. I was returning from a store – with a hoodie on and an Arizona can in my right hand. As he turned his head to look over his shoulder at least three more times, I realized something even more unsettling though … I didn’t have my ‘being black doesn’t make me dangerous’ card. Apparently, my demographic – young, black and male – has to carry those nowadays to prevent such situations, or else we could be the next ones caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. I thought, if only I could whistle Vivaldi. You would think I know how to by now. After all, this pretty much happens every week.”

My very Caucasian self has heard many others of my race excoriating black people, never thinking that it is perhaps our nation’s overall continued focus on race without the required open dialogue that creates situations just like the one Colin suffered at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass of all places.

We don’t know what it is to be judged in quite that way and likely never will.

But others feel it all the time.

Maybe, just maybe, the dialogue will come. Maybe it will be someone like Colin, who says he still hopes that one day race won’t matter in this society.

“We might get there one day, if people recognize that it does and begin to mend the problems associated with race,” Colin said. “I’m still cautiously optimistic.”

I’m not as optimistic as Colin, Not even cautiously so. But then, I never went to Harvard.