Here’s the question, and see my video response below:

I’ve been a long time fan of blogs centered around the concerns of Black women, seeing that I am one, and being from an upper middle class environment my values are largely in line with the ones uplifted on your blog and in your book, which was wonderful by the way!

So to my struggle, I will be a senior in high school this fall. I attend a very costly private school in the Northeast. I am largely surrounded by white peers. In my class there are only three African Americans and one Asian from the Philippines. I am classy, I come from a stable two parent home and my parents are far more concerned about class and quality than race in my partners. I am friendly and outgoing and I have a wide circle of friends, or better yet, associates but when it comes to developing romantic relationships, something strange begins to happen. I get edged out. Its hard to explain because it never is done overtly but trust me, this is not my imagination. A recent example is at the end of my junior year, this past May and early June, I was hitting it off with a male friend. I’ve always thought he was attractive but never had much personal contact with him since Junior year when we took Economics together. We became closer instantly, flirty joking in class led to texts, texts led to him popping by my table at lunch to annoy me and my friends, etc. Our class and our school is very small so I’m sure people were starting to notice and I could sense and feel something was beginning to change about my interactions with other peers. People started looking at me with a bit of suspicion, the smiles and cordial words were the same but there was a look behind their eyes, like they knew something they weren’t telling me.

All of a sudden, I stopped getting certain party invitations from a certain group of girls, I wouldn’t even know about things until I saw the pictures on facebook. My male friend was invited, but I wasn’t. In my social setting, it is impolite to complain or ask why you weren’t invited to something. That just makes you look desperate. However, my male friend at the time would tell me about the events but he was largely going to hang out with his male friends. More of these events led to less of us talking outside of school and barely any contact over the summer. We weren’t quite at the level of ‘dates’ yet and now, he is dating one of the girls in the ‘inner circle’ who mysteriously started throwing these parties without me. It is odd to me because I wasn’t even aware of them talking before these VIP parties. I know what happened. I was edged out. Which was particularly hurtful because I thought I had a decent level of rapport with these girls until I realized what they had done.

How will I avoid these situations in the future? What do I do when I feel like I’m being frozen out? Should I have crashed the party? I feel like I did something wrong but I don’t know what I could have done to change or prevent what was going on. I can’t help but feel that it was done with purpose because people knew we were starting to get together and were talking about it. I need the expertise of the BB&W crew.

Please help!