Globalizing Athens

Winsome Chunnu-Brayda laughs with students in the Multicultural Center. Photos by Andrew Thompson

Alexis McCurdy

In Winsome Chunnu-Brayda’s words, “I’m a bad bitch, and my friends are bad too.” Armed with a firecracker spirit and years of international experience, Chunnu is pouring her immense passion for the things she loves, like cultural competency, into Ohio University’s campus as director of the Multicultural Center.

Chunnu, with loose curls tucked neatly on top of her head, gives an exuberant smile and contagious laugh to everyone she comes in contact with. Her office is filled with trinkets from around the world, including a map of the Caribbean and LGBTQ positive stickers, supporting different identity organizations around campus. Multiple people stop by her office and she never shows an ounce of agitation. Effortlessly friendly, Chunnu makes everyone feel at home.

Chunnu’s hospitable spirit has humble beginnings in Kingston, Jamaica, where she was born and raised. Delighting in the bustling hospitality industry bursting with promise and opportunity, Chunnu originally thought her career goal was to be a hotel manager. After high school, she worked at a Jamaican resort as an entertainment coordinator. Working her way up the chain, she eventually became the front office manager, overseeing the reservations area as well as the front desk.

“Although the hours were grueling, I loved it,” Chunnu says.

It was at this time—in the early 2000s—that Chunnu heard from Claudia Titus, a friend who was working at a family resort in St. Mary’s, Jamaica. At the time, both women were students at the Western Hospitality Institute, which had just made a reciprocal arrangement with Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, to set up an exchange program. After some time, students from the institute could take credits at Hocking to finish their associate’s degree.

Titus was the first of the two to move more than 1,500 miles from Jamaica to rural Appalachia for the program and, eventually, Chunnu followed her lead.

“I came to Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, and had a very, very positive experience,” Chunnu says. “I often share the story that Hocking College remains my most memorable college experience.”

Chunnu grew to love the region and all it had to offer. She even mingled on OU’s main campus with other African and Caribbean students, learning what their life was like as international students in Southeast Ohio.

But life wasn’t always seen through rose-colored lenses. Sometimes, in matters of diversity, life became a bit muddied. Chunnu vividly remembers walking into a bathroom stall and seeing the following words scribbled on the door: “N----rs go home. The American dream is to see Africans going back to Africa with their sacks on their backs.”

Chunnu wasn’t as stunned by the statement as some of her black peers. In a cultural context, she wasn’t ever raised “black.” In her culture, the child takes their father’s nationality. With Chunnu’s father being Indian, she was raised and treated as Indian in Jamaica.

“The ‘n word’ is a uniquely American construct,” Chunnu says. “At the time, I knew that it was bad, and it shouldn’t have happened, but it wasn’t as jarring for me, as I can remember, as it was for my friends who were African Americans. And again, I was new to the U.S.”

Nevertheless, Chunnu still sees Hocking College as a positive experience. After graduating with her associate’s degree in Hotel Restaurant Management, she went on to complete her bachelor’s at Houston Tillitson College, which is now Houston Tillitson University.

That was made possible when the president of the Western Hospitality Institute, Cecil Cornwall, Ph.D., established more reciprocal agreements that said once students from Hocking College finished their associate’s, they could go on to obtain their bachelor’s at Houston Tillitson.

Graduating summa cum laude from Houston Tillitson, Chunnu didn’t have a shortage of schools recruiting her. As Houston Tillitson was a historically black college (HBCU), many hospitality graduate programs took a pit stop there in an effort to diversify its student body population.

However, something was drawing Chunnu back to a little town in Southeast Ohio. Ignoring other schools offering her full scholarships, Chunnu ultimately decided to come to OU on a partial scholarship. It was a love too great to give up.

“I wasn’t a student at OU, but I met so many African and Caribbean students who were at OU at the time, and that gave me a sense of what graduate education would be like in a community where you felt supported,” Chunnu says. “I felt I would rather be somewhere where I at least know the lay of the land as an international student, than somewhere I didn’t know.”

It was at this time that Chunnu also realized that hospitality wasn’t her passion. The industry didn’t have the passion and the thrill she was really looking for. It was an old love that called her back and made her refocus her life on politics.

Chunnu was politically charged from a young age. It was only natural in Jamaica, a country, she says, where people feel very strongly and unwavering about their political parties.

In one vivid memory, Chunnu recalls finding herself in uncharted territory. People across the country had erupted in protest due to new legislation that introduced a drastic increase in gas prices. The objective was mainly aimed at tourists, but also had consequences for Jamaican citizens.

The new legislation would cause bus fares to skyrocket, the most central mode of transportation Jamaicans used to go to and from work. Gas was also used to cook food, so it would have an effect on every citizen, whether they left the house or not.

While walking to school one morning, Chunnu saw a crowd of people protesting, roads blocked off and a culminating unrest unfolding. Enthusiastically and without hesitation, Chunnu, armed in her school uniform, joined the protest. She played as integral a part as everybody else.

But suddenly, something was wrong. Chunnu couldn’t see and with one of her most vital senses gone, she didn’t know what to think.

She heard a man cry out that a helicopter was tear-gassing the crowd from the air. As panic ensued, she was aided by a kind stranger, a woman who gave her a damp cloth to put over her eyes.

As witnessed by that event, a passion for a fundamentally equitable society is not new to her, like it might be for some supporters of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“I laugh and say I’ve been a democratic socialist since I was in high school,” Chunnu says. “This is new to you all, but I’ve been rocking with this for a minute.”

Looking back on that memory, and many more political occurrences that happened in her lifetime, something began to churn within Chunnu. Like a moth to a flame, she found comfort in that first love.

Upon graduating from Houston Tillitson, Chunnu pursued her master’s in political science at OU, with a focus in international relations. She went on to intern for Marc Dann, a democratic Ohio state senator at the time, and worked on the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign as a graduate student.

From the moment Chunnu decided she wanted to be a political science student, she set her sights high for her career goals. She says the dream came out of the blue when she decided she wanted to be Jamaica’s ambassador to Nigeria. She began to look at ambassadorships and what it means to be one. She thought a qualification in cultural competence would help demonstrate her ability to negotiate with people from different places.

Chunnu started looking at the Cultural Studies and Education Ph.D. program at OU, as she had a friend already in the program. It was everything she wanted it to be.

“Because cultural studies as a discipline fundamentally looks at power and how power is used in terms of who has access to resources etcetera, I thought this is perfect,” Chunnu says. “This is what I’m concerned about as a citizen, that everyone in our society, Winsome Chunnu-Brayda laughs with students in the Multicultural Center irrespective of who you are, what you believe, your educational status, in a democracy, should have access to minimum resources if nothing else.”

The cultural studies program was the most diverse at the time with international students from across the globe. Every student had the opportunity to look at how power is used in their own country, sharing their insights, so that other students could look at power on a global scale. Even American students analyzed how minorities’ power differed from the majority’s.

During her time in the program as a financially unstable international student, Chunnu realized she needed funding. She started applying for assistantships and received a position in the OU Multicultural Center (MCC).

“What that did was further open my eyes to the African-American experience,” Chunnu says. “So, I learned somewhat about the African-American experience when I was at an HBCU, but we know the African-American experience, like everybody else, is nuanced, complex and on a spectrum. We’re all different. Then you factor in black people from other countries and what that means. So, it gave me a unique insight. I wanted to learn more.”

In fact, Chunnu went back to Jamaica in December to speak to her alma mater’s graduating class as the first person to receive their Ph.D. from that school.

She eventually went on to hold positions in Housing and Residence Life and interned in D.C. for the Congressional Youth Leadership Council, a program that brings high school students from around the globe to learn about America’s foreign policy.

While she was in D.C., her boss from the MCC, Linda Daniels, called Chunnu and asked her to be the assistant director as the MCC made its transition from Lindley Hall to Baker Center.

Chunnu had her reservations, thinking that the position would delay her degree.

“She begged and begged because I was such an awesome graduate assistant when I was in the office. [So much so] that even though I left a year later, she still remembered that I was that bitch,” Chunnu says.

In what Chunnu calls a “wonderful trajectory” throughout the past 13 years, she now is the director for the MCC. In her role, she advises the Black Student Programming Board, oversees programming for various heritage month and leads training on implicit bias, cultural competence and microaggressions for faculty, community members and local and state organizations.

Now, she believes she has found her calling.

In her role, Chunnu has faced challenges navigating diversity conversations. It can become uncomfortable when talking about America’s history and how, historically, minorities have been treated extremely unjustly.

“There is still some contention about how some people in our country accept that as a part of our country’s narrative,” Chunnu says. “It is, whether we want to accept it or not, it’s a part of our country’s history.”

Chunnu says her job is to help people overcome the initial cognitive dissonance and understand the challenges different people in this country face, not wag fingers at the majority for being “bad people.”

So while the MCC serves as a space for minority students to gain support, it is also there for majority students to gain a broader sense of the nuances in a changing society. In this way, Chunnu finds her role “crucial and critical.”

“We are here because we want our students to become global Bobcats,” Chunnu says. “If we want our students to function effectively in an ever-evolving global world, they have to develop a cultural competence. Most of our students come from the state of Ohio and homogeneous areas and homogeneous high schools.”

Chunnu understands that sometimes people may not be exposed to those conversations in their everyday lives. Sometimes, minority students won’t share their experiences, as a result of being tired with educating people or choosing a path of least resistance.

However, Chunnu doesn’t have that luxury. Her friends and co-workers know where she stands on every issue. She says in order to build genuine relationships, people need to be authentic with each other.

“As the director for the multicultural center at a predominantly white institution and someone who is passionate about equality and justice, I cannot be passive,” Chunnu says. “I cannot choose the path of least resistance. If I did that, in my role, I will be failing as the director and I will be failing my Bobcats.”