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 Friday through Sunday. And we had all come together at the university on the hill.
Little did I know that the diversity I was falling in love with was not fully acknowledged outside of our community. To everyone else, we were just Black and essentially the same. For over 50 years, institutions of higher education have been wrestling with outcomes associated with increased racial diversity on college campuses (Allen et al., 2018). Supreme Court rulings and the growing presence of Black students on predominantly white campuses have led many campuses to replace their color-conscious understandings of the race (read: Black students) with the term diversity. Or what Berrey (2011) refers to as racial orthodoxy, “a set of ideas, beliefs, narratives, and practices that constitute official, commonly recognized–but not necessarily hegemonic–understandings of race” (p. 574). Without knowing it, I had become a part of the diversity on my campus. I had also become the other. This framing also happens within higher education research. As scholars, we have to be cognizant of the ways we shape and perpetuate understandings of what diversity means and what it aims to do. What boundaries are we placing around this term and how might it reinforce whiteness?
First-year seminar courses are marked as a high-impact practice for the ways they encourage new students to critically examine some of society’s biggest questions in a collaborative setting. In my first-year seminar course, a white woman classmate leaned over in her seat to share that being in class with me was the closest she had ever been to a Black person. I wasn’t sure how to process my classmate’s observation. I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the west side of Chicago and attended school on the predominantly White north side. I was always aware that I was a brown-skinned Black girl, but I never viewed myself as an object until that moment. What other critical observations was my white classmate making about me? My physical presence had become a learning moment for my classmate, but what about me? At that moment, I realized that I was a novelty and someone to be studied. Is this an unintended outcome of a high-impact practice?
We could fill a library with studies that highlight the ways that Black students have been positioned as the other within higher education. Black students are often studied to understand the ways that they respond to racially hostile environments. The findings continue to reveal that we build fortresses to withstand storms. However, there’s room to consider how Black students are also studying other Black people and everyone else. We as students were managing everyone’s assumptions about how we move through the world, while also learning new ways of being in the world. Numerous scholars have pushed us to have bigger imaginations when it comes to the ways we design and analyze studies to understand the experiences of Black college students. Stewart (2008) noted the ways that college campuses become a laboratory for Black students to make meaning of their identities. Critical consciousness (George Mwangi et al., 2019) and the Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity (Griffin & McIntosh, 2015 ) have been used to explore how Black students’ nativity and racial and ethnic identity inform their college experience. Placemaking (Tichavakunda, 2020) and Black joy (Tichavakunda, 2021) are theoretical and conceptual frameworks through which to understand the agency among Black students. Blacktransfeminist thought (Jourian & McCloud, 2020) encourages a deeper understanding of the intersections of Blackness, gender, and sexuality.
This always leads me to the questions:
What do
we believe about Black college students?
Do we continue to believe that Black students
will move through college in the same ways?
Do we believe that all Black
students come to college with the awareness, knowledge, and skills to respond
to their hyper-marginalization on campus?
The research has documented that diversity initiatives prioritize white comfort in the name of creating a society of thoughtful and engaged citizens. What does this mean for Black students? How do campuses support Black students who don’t have the language to respond to their white classmate who has never seen a Black person up close? What opportunities exist for Black students to learn about each other and the many ways to be Black?
I’ve offered a lot of questions that I’ve wrestled with in my work as a student affairs educator and now a faculty member. We cannot continue to monolithically position Black students simply as the diversity and the other within higher education. We have to acknowledge and seek to further understand the ways that Black students are learning about themselves and other Black people. And not simply in response to the white imagination.
References
Allen, W. R., McLewis, C., Jones, C., & Harris, D. (2018). From Bakke to Fisher: African American students in US higher education over forty years. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 4(6), 41-72.
Berrey, E. C. (2011). Why diversity became orthodox in higher education, and how it changed the meaning of race on campus. Critical Sociology, 37(5), 573-596.
George Mwangi, C. A. G., Daoud, N., Peralta, A., & Fries-Britt, S. (2019). Waking from the American dream: Conceptualizing racial activism and critical consciousness among Black immigrant college students. Journal of College Student Development, 60(4), 401-420.
Griffin, K. A., & McIntosh, K. L. (2015). Finding a fit: Understanding Black immigrant students' engagement in campus activities. Journal of College Student Development, 56(3), 243-260.
Kuh, G. D. (2008). Excerpt from high-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities, 14(3), 28-29.
Stewart, D.L. (2008). Being all of me: Black students negotiating multiple identities. The Journal of Higher Education, 79(2), 183-207.
Tichavakunda, A. A. (2020). Studying black student life on campus: Toward a theory of black placemaking in higher education. Urban Education, 0042085920971354.
About the Author
Laila McCloud, Ph.D. is an Assistant
Professor of Higher Education in the Educational Leadership and Counseling
department at Grand Valley State University. Her research uses critical
theories and methods to broadly explore the professional and academic
socialization of Black students within U.S. higher education. Dr. McCloud finds
joy in being her son's biggest cheerleader, listening to 90s hip-hop and
R&B, and watching reality tv and basketball.
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