Antar A. Tichavakunda, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Race and Higher Education, University of California Santa Barbara.               Dr. Laila McCloud’s work ( Jourian & McCloud, 2020 ) pushes me to have a more expansive view of Blackness, especially about what I take for granted in understanding Black student identity and their experiences. Continuing the push for an expansive Blackness, McCloud poses critical questions and provocations for anyone invested in higher education and/or diversity, more broadly, in her recent  piece .   “What do we believe about Black college students?” McCloud asks. She urges scholars to examine the complexity, dynamism, tensions, and beauty of Black students’ lives. Yet she offers a critical caveat. Indeed, we must seek to better understand and support Black students, but “not simply in response to the white imagination.” These fundamental provocations beckon scholars who profess to care about Black life to look inward, look to their scholarship, and

Laila McCloud, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Educational Leadership and Counseling Department, Grand Valley State University.           I didn’t become aware of the term  diversity  until my first year of college. I left the west side of Chicago for a small, private liberal arts college in rural Ohio. It was on that campus that I learned about the many ways to be Black. I learned to love the distinct way that Black folks from Louisville and Baltimore pronounce words with the letter “r” in them. I met Black folks from California and Texas who told me that the tacos I had in Chicago were trash. Some of us graduated from elite boarding schools in the northeast like Choate or the George School. Some of us had white parents and some of us were dating white people. Some of us were the children of immigrants from the Caribbean, west, and east African countries. Some of us were coming into our queerness. We had different religious upbringings that impacted how we understood what to do Fri

Alex C. Lange, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Higher education, School of Education at Colorado State University  The night I began to outline the first chapter of my (original) dissertation [1] focused on transgender students’ self-authorship capacities, something nagged at my spirit. A cowlick that would not rest comfortably. A small splinter, not even a millimeter deep in my hand. As I stared at my poster board, trying to make sense of what bothered me, cold water splashed me in the face. I grabbed a sticky note and a metallic-colored marker and wrote down the phrase to make sure I would not run away from it:   What does it mean to study student development in a time of death, division, and disease?  When I wrote that note on March 25, 2020, I thought of the Black and Latina trans women and transfeminine people, who are exponentially subject to violence compared to their cisgender counterparts and their transmasculine and non-binary siblings. The trans community knows death