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Yes, I Can!

Lucille wore the “Raw Bacon Robotics Team” and Iowa State University College of Engineering T-shirts with pride as she is not only navigating college on a predominantly white campus, but her area of study is engineering where she is surrounded by almost all white men.

“That is from the engineering team I was on in high school. The team’s name was Raw Bacon, which when you look at a shirt and it says Raw Bacon you are like ‘what?’ So a lot of people ask me about it, and that’s why I continue to wear the shirt cause people are like ‘what the heck is Raw Bacon?’ So I get to talk to them about engineering and I get to talk to them about what I do which is a really cool part about ‘oh here is someone who is in engineering who is a black person.’” -Lucille

ISU T-Shirt

Iowa State University grey cotton T-shirt with heat press printed and appliquéd school name and white and red ribbon embellished sleeves, c. 2010s. Owned by Lucille. Straight leg jeans in dark wash, ISU Textiles and Clothing Museum. Photo by Dyese Matthews and Kelly L. Reddy-Best, 2019.

Raw Bacon Robotics

Long sleeve grey cotton T-shirt with screen printed with text “raw bacon robotics” and cartoon imagery, c. 2010s. Owned by Lucille. Wide leg jeans in dark wash, ISU Textiles and Clothing Museum. Photo by Dyese Matthews and Kelly L. Reddy-Best, 2019.

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Collegiate Fashion and Activism: Black Women’s Styles on the College Campus Copyright © 2019 by Dyese Matthews and Kelly L. Reddy-Best is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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