Senior Profile | Charlotte Blackman
The Pragmatic Idealist Charlotte Blackman has consistently demonstrated both her idealistic vision for human rights in the world as well as her pragmatic resolve and willingness to work hard to achieve that vision. —Scott Brasesco ’22 When talking with Charlotte Blackman ’20, one thing that becomes immediately clear is her drive to improve the lives of those around her and leave the world a better place than she found it. This is something she has demonstrated countless times at Amherst through her work with the Women’s and Gender Center (WGC), where she has served as a graphic designer, program coordinator and education coordinator on projects such as the healing mural — which still hangs in Keefe Campus Center — or her work to start a support group for survivors of sexual violence, which would have been launched near the end of the semester but was upended by the coronavirus pandemic. At the end of my interviews with her friends, coworkers and professors, I understood that Blackman is also someone who always goes the extra mile and makes the extra effort. She has taken more responsibility each year at the WGC and continued to pursue side projects, such as her work with content warnings, and uncredited work, such as her continued graphic design work, in order to improve the WGC and the college. She participated in Choral Society where she was a natural leader, taking the time to hash out the issues her peers had and
doing the work to make sure they got solved. Blackman’s thesis advisor Sean Redding, the Zephaniah Swift Moore Professor of History, described the combination of this drive to make the world a better place and the hard-working nature to get it done best, saying “[Blackman] has an unusual combination of idealism and pragmatism, she wants to get things done but she also wants to adhere to very high ideals.”
Going to Amherst Blackman was raised in the Bronx by the women on her mother’s side of her working-class Italian American family. From them, she learned the value of community and closeness: her grandma lived next door to her and her mother, and her aunt lived on the other side of the building. She began her education in her local public school, P.S. 24 of the Bronx, but received a scholarship to attend Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private preparatory school, in sixth grade. She is the only person in her family to have ever attended private school, and the introduction to a whole new world of wealth and privilege felt culturally foreign to her. This culture shock spurred Blackman’s involvement in activism, as she was forced to contend with
20 | The Amherst Student | May 31, 2020
both her disadvantages as a low-income woman and also the privileges of her whiteness. Though her experience in private school was jarring, the availability of better education and resources gave Blackman the opportunity to truly think about her post-secondary education in a way that hadn’t been an option before. Even so, she described being “iffy” as a high school junior about whether or not to apply to college. “I felt like it wasn’t fair to use the advantages [of prep school] over people who hadn’t been as fortunate,” Blackman confessed to me. However, she figured she would ultimately be able to do more good for her community and for the world at large if she chose to get a college education and use it to benefit those who are most disadvantaged, sharing that she had told herself: “You were put in this place, now you have to use that power to help other people.” Her older sister was the first person in her family to go to a residential college, choosing Barnard which was close to home. Blackman wanted to take a bigger leap of faith and try something that would take her out of New York and out of her element. So she chose Amherst. “I was drawn to Amherst for its environment, which is so different
Photo courtesy of Charlotte Blackman ’20
Blackman has used her drive and idealism to improve Amherst for survivors of sexual violence and other oppressed groups, and she hopes to do the same for the world at large. from New York, but also for the culture of sustainability, activism, art and music that I saw in the Pioneer Valley. I also felt like the [Five College] Consortium would give me a good opportunity to branch out and try different things if I didn’t like the small size [of Amherst],” she said.
Learning Something New Blackman describes her choice to major in history as though it were made almost at random. As a first year, she was determined to make full use of the plethora of academic options available at the college to both learn something outside of her planned mathematics major and gain a fuller understanding of the world around her, sharing. “I wanted to know more about systems of power and how they impact people so
I could use my education to try to work against the power systems and imbalances I saw around me,” she said. She thought first to try sociology, which would pair nicely with her intended math major, but opted to lean even further into the humanities, taking the risk of a history course in her second semester. The risk paid off. By the end of Blackman’s first spring semester, Dean of New Students and Professor of History Rick Lopez, who taught her in Struggles for Democracy in Modern Latin America, had even suggested that she consider a history major, something wildly different than her initial plan to major in mathematics. That summer, she had an epiphany. Blackman realized that the best way to give back to the world was to learn about people and their societ-
