Black and White

Sexton met her husband, Thomas Sexton ’04, when they were on a Dartmouth foreign study program in Trinidad. In a personal essay for The Guardian, she writes: 

We still talk about that night with nostalgia: the rum, the dancefloor, the youth. But if I was on edge before we started dating, I became chronically anxious after. I had a distinct fear that someone was going to discriminate against me in front of him and he would then view me the way society stereotypically views Black people. (Again, when my children were born, I feared that some white person would denigrate me in front of them, and I’d lose a sense of my own authority, the confidence I feel as their protector and guide.) If that were to happen, I knew he would stand beside me, help to defend me, but I worried that our power dynamic would be irretrievably altered because we would both know that of the two of us, one was viewed as more worthwhile. I worried I wouldn’t be able to shake off how small that might make me feel.