5

Power in the Midst of Powerlessness

Scholar-Activist Identity amid Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violence

With Elan Hope

If the 1960s was the watershed moment of activism and political organizing for racial-ethnic equity and inclusion, 2012–2014 marks the years that a new generation of activists awoke to understand that they would have to bring a new fight to an old battle. As they did in the student-led justice movements of the past, college students today are leading and answering persistent calls for social and political change.¹ In addition to developing their intellectual and occupational selves, college students are also developing their political selves by exploring who they are in relation to the communities around them. They are deciding how they will contribute to the greater community beyond one’s self. This is what Heather Malin and colleagues describe as “civic purpose.”² This long-term commitment to and participation in civic and political actions includes learning about social justice and what can be done to make the world an equitable place for marginalized groups.

For our cohort of students, who entered college in 2013, identity development included understanding a world with the first Black president of the United States. A world with social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter, which use distributed leadership to challenge systems of racial-ethnic oppression and seek justice for racially and ethnically motivated violence. A world with the Dreamers movement, which unites undocumented immigrant youth who risk themselves to protest anti-immigrant sentiments and advance the stalled conversation on immigration. Because of these societal realities, Black and Latinx college students have to balance academic pursuits with evolving racial-ethnic identity and growing civic purpose. In this chapter, we focus on how identity-based counterspaces and activist campus culture facilitate Latinx and Black students’ critical examination of race-ethnicity and racism.

We begin with Cindy, a Latinx female first-generation college student. Cindy was raised primarily by her father in a working-class household. She was the middle child, with an older sister in college and a younger sister in high school. Cindy always had a love for learning and knew since elementary school that she wanted to go to college, an opportunity that neither of her parents had. At her suburban high school, she was one of only a handful of Latinx students. She navigated the college application process on her own, despite her guidance counselor’s recommendation to attend a community college. Upon her first visit to Urban PrivateU-North she knew “this is where I’m gonna go.” Cindy described her transition to college as “very smooth,” marked by engaging classroom experiences, participation in campus organizations, and exposure to people from different cultural backgrounds and lifestyles. For Cindy, social life is about personal growth, which she describes as “developing myself as a human being, becoming aware of what’s going on in society, and then helping others do the same.” She enjoyed being involved in political activism both on and off campus.

Another of our interviewees, Faith, was also excited to begin college. Faith, the youngest of three, is a Black female first-generation college student. Faith was raised in a two-parent, working-class household. Faith knew in elementary school that she wanted to go to college, and her parents, friends, and a high school guidance counselor supported her through the college application process. Unlike Cindy, Faith described her experience at Urban StateU as a “culture shock.” The student population on campus was more racially and ethnically diverse than her majority African American and Latinx high school. Faith was not social during her first year. She struggled with going from being “somebody” in high school to being “nobody in a sea of millions.” However, by the end of her sophomore year she had “opened up more to people. I was willing to develop more relationships with others and not be so solitary.” While Faith was abreast of the hostile climate surrounding racial-ethnic minorities in the United States, she preferred to avoid high-risk political activism, like protests.

Pathways into College

Both Cindy and Faith came to college with the goal of upward mobility through higher education. As Cindy put it, “I’ve always loved school, so I knew since the second my parents told me that they didn’t go to college that that was something I was gonna do. Since elementary school I knew that was gonna be something for me.”

Cindy majored in accounting, and by the end of her first year she had secured an internship with a local accounting firm, with prospects of employment after graduation. She went to college to further her intellectual development. “I love learning and applying that information that I’ve learned.” And, given the financial hardships she experienced growing up, she was motivated to attend college equally for the prospects of upward mobility. “I know how my dad struggles, and I know how he lives paycheck to paycheck and can barely stay above water sometimes… . I don’t want that for my children, and I don’t want that for myself either.”

Faith also saw college as a way to obtain higher-paying and more secure job opportunities than her parents had. Neither woman wanted to repeat the family pattern. As Faith put it, “I just felt like if [my mom] had a degree, maybe things would have been easier for her as far as raising her kids. So that was one of the reasons why I definitely wanted to go to school … so that I wouldn’t have to ever struggle. And I know that that doesn’t guarantee anything, because you can get a degree and still kind of have a low-income job. But my main reason, so that I could get a good job.”

“I also wanted to go to college for the experience,” she continued. “I didn’t want to just graduate high school and work at McDonald’s… . I’m still young now, so I have this opportunity to go out and have fun and learn things, and I feel like knowledge is really important now, so you have to use it.” She also felt an obligation, she said. “Obligated because I wanted to make something of myself, so I kind of felt like I had no other choice. I could have done the military or taken a year off, but I felt like this is the time now. And if I don’t do it now, then I’ll regret it later.”

While there are many similarities between Cindy and Faith, they had different pathways into college. Cindy was self-directed as she completed her college applications and chose a college to attend. Her parents provided emotional support, but they could not guide her through the application process. She also received minimal assistance from her high school guidance counselor. Cindy carried this independence and self-advocacy into her first year at Urban PrivateU-North.

Although Faith’s parents also did not have college degrees, they had taken some college courses and did not have the challenge of being complete outsiders to higher education, as Cindy’s immigrant parents were. Faith noted that “my adviser in high school [helped], my parents helped me, and some of my friends [helped]. [My parents] helped me by finding colleges that they knew that I would be interested in, … and they took me on the tours and the trips to see the colleges.” Despite the differences in their path into college, both women enrolled with the same level of willingness to intertwine their personal identity with their institutional identity.

Sociopolitical Engagement and Campus Belonging

As they transitioned to college, Cindy and Faith had opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities on campus. Some of those opportunities included civic engagement or other forms of political activism. The sociopolitical development model suggests that youth civic engagement and political activism are predicted, in part, by opportunities to engage.³ Essentially, give students an opportunity to participate in a cause that resonates with them, and they will. For Cindy, extracurricular activities that included civic engagement and activism were a prominent part of her first-year college experience—and an important counterspace.

Cindy’s experiences illustrate that academic courses can function as ideational counterspaces, especially when ideas from class translate into civic action. Andrew Case and Carla Hunter note that ideational counterspaces are created when individuals of different social groups come together for a similar anti-oppression purpose.⁴

Cindy’s scholar-activist identity developed through campus student organizations and extracurricular activities. When asked what was her most positive first-year experience, she highlighted social issues: “Probably the events I did with my [social and political activism] organization. I think what keeps me going is people going up to me from different organizations after the event and saying like, wow, my perspective has completely changed, or you know this has inspired me to want to do this, or let’s collaborate on something, let’s bring an event together.” The sense of fulfillment and “having people say thank you, you’ve inspired me” to her was worth all the work. “There’s no price tag on the way that me and the people that put on that event feel.”

Opportunities to engage with social justice actions were important for the development of Cindy’s scholar-activist identity. She grew in her understandings of structural inequalities and her desire to address injustices through political activism. Participation in social justice works in concert with opportunities to interact with students from diverse backgrounds, and universities implicitly acknowledge this symbiotic relationship. Among college and university mission statements, two of the most prevalent themes are commitment to diversity and institutional and civic service.⁵

These intentional efforts at creating opportunities for interactional diversity are the primary way that Urban PrivateU-North differed from all the other schools in our study. As Cindy said, when the department of multicultural affairs put on an event, “everybody knows it’s not just the students of color on campus who are allowed to go… . I invite my Caucasian friends all the time, and they don’t think twice to come because we know it’s OK to interact with the people of different cultures, and they know they’re gonna be accepted and not looked at… . I like that everyone is willing to accept everybody, and even if they can’t resonate or identify with that idea or that religion or that culture, they accept it and embrace it.”

As noted in almost every chapter in this book, college students, many of whom are coming from racially-ethnically and socioeconomically segregated high schools, have limited skills for building relationships with others who are “not like me.” Research shows that institutions that are intentional in creating opportunities for frequent, meaningful, and sustained interactions across student diversity create campuses with greater tolerance for diverse perspectives and a greater likelihood of not just interracial contact but meaningful interracial friendships.⁶ Meaningful opportunities for intergroup interactions, coupled with a campus social justice focus, may make for greater opportunities for coalition building among students and an integrated scholar-activist identity.

For Faith the shift from being a big fish in a small pond to being a little fish in a big pond initially destabilized her sense of self until she was able to find her micro-community on campus. Faith is an avid musician, and her micro- community was with other members of a campus band. “I only play saxophone, oboe, and clarinet at [Urban StateU], and I made my friends there. And musicians are really weird, so I learned that about them.”

Band was a time-consuming extracurricular activity that first year, so although she expressed interest in civic activities, Faith had little time to engage with other campus organizations. By sophomore year, however, Faith had become more integrated with the campus community, which improved her overall college experience. “I opened up more to people,” she said. “I was willing to develop more relationships with others and not be so solitary and only hang out with people that I knew. I joined a group called Student Activity Board, so that opened up to meeting a lot of people. It helped me to network. I got to meet a lot of famous people actually… . And it was sooo fun, it was so much fun. So that’s improved my college experience for the better.”

Although Faith embraced the racial-ethnic diversity of her campus, her engagement did not yield the same scholar-activist identity that Cindy developed. There is no expectation that all racial-ethnic minority students should or need to develop a scholar-activist identity, but research shows that it facilitates more adaptive coping with racial-ethnic microaggression, discrimination, and injustice.⁷

College Students Are Not Immune to Social Unrest

Paths to scholar-activist identities are varied and can be influenced by students’ personal beliefs, by their campus context, and by the larger society that intrudes on their “time away at college.” Part of the context for both Cindy and Faith was the public documentation of racially-ethnically motivated violence, including the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and Renisha McBride. This social-media-consumed, constant display of racism in America means that Black and Latinx college students are repeatedly reminded of life-threatening structural oppression and opportunities for consciousness-raising and action to combat this oppression.⁸ Traditional models of college student development argue that college provides young adults with time and space to free themselves of sociopolitical concerns and embark on individualized self-development.⁹ That is rarely true for students from historically marginalized groups, however, and in today’s climate, Black and Latinx students do not have the luxury to dissociate from larger sociopolitical issues.

Cindy and Faith describe similar cognitive and emotional responses to issues of racial-ethnic injustice. Cindy was marked by her cousin’s death the previous year. Released from jail, he was making attempts to “get his life together,” she said. But he would later die in police custody without receiving medical attention. That, to her, was inexcusable. “To me, no one should be [treated that way], I don’t care what you did. You should not be refused the right, the possibility of life. And for me I just think how different would it be if he was Caucasian. If he was a White guy… . He’s of a very dark complexion. So, at first meeting him you would probably think that he’s Black, that’s how dark-skinned he is.”

Social and news media discussions of racially and ethnically motivated violence are not theoretical or an abstraction for students like Cindy. These discussions have very real implications for family, friends, and friends of friends. Constantly needing to defend her humanity and struggle against racism deepened her convictions on these issues, but it was also mentally and emotionally taxing.

By the end of sophomore year Cindy had developed a nuanced articulation of her social justice–oriented civic identity. “You know those are innocent lives that are being taken,” she said. “I don’t think that just because you don’t identify with a race or you don’t come from that culture you should be able to brush aside an injustice.” Cindy’s development illustrates how a university’s intentional cultivation of both interactional diversity and opportunities for civic engagement can foster the ability to connect one’s future with the futures of others “not like me.”

Faith’s response to racially and ethnically motivated violence was directly tied to her identity as a Black woman and the implications of being Black in America.

In addition to the daily news about racially-ethnically motivated violence and the stress it brought, Faith had to defend against stereotypes and assumptions about how she should feel or act as a Black person in this sociopolitical climate. When asked about her most stressful experience, she said it was being generalized and stereotyped, “because I’m Black that I am going to feel a certain way about what’s going on in the world.”

As discussed in chapter 9, social identity threat is when individuals experience or perceive that one or more of their social identities is not valued.¹⁰ When Faith’s Black identity was threatened, she responded in ways that deemphasized rather than reinforced that identity. This is in sharp contrast to Cindy, who, because she was embedded in a campus network of justice-oriented peers, responded to identity threats in ways that asserted rather than weakened her Latinx identity. The two women’s different coping responses would not have been predicted from the level of structural diversity on their respective campuses. Faith’s institution (26 percent Latinx and 8 percent Black) was substantially more demographically diverse than Cindy’s (13 percent Latinx and 4 percent Black). However, as Nick Crossley and Joseph Ibrahim note, a “critical mass per se is insufficient for collective action and that a mass only gives rise to collective action where its members are networked.”¹¹ Cindy was immersed in her university’s culture of social justice and the many available campus counterspaces. Faith did not describe a similar culture, and while those groups might exist, she was unable or unwilling to engage them, even though her campus was demographically more racially-ethnically diverse.

The Role of Counterspaces in Adaptive Responding to Identity Threats

Differences in precollege life experiences and transitions to college affected how Cindy and Faith responded to racial-ethnic injustice and violence. Cindy learned the importance of self-advocacy on her pathway to college, and Faith had many supporters walk with her on her pathway to college. Cindy immediately embraced the social justice campus environment and found like-minded friends, and Faith struggled to find friends and campus organizations to engage with. Beyond that context, we focus on how their involvement in racial-ethnic counterspaces during their first year on campus set them up to engage versus withdraw when feeling racially-ethnically threatened.

As detailed in chapter 7, minority-focused extracurricular clubs and organizations serve as counterspaces for students on campus, spaces where minority students can develop agency—active resilience, resistance, and circumvention of the psychological consequences of oppression.¹² Students like Cindy locate their campus belonging in these counterspaces, whereas students like Faith eschew these spaces in favor of participating in campus-wide activities. Cindy was involved in several such counterspaces her first year and held a leadership position in at least one of them. “I’m not like super, super active [in] the Latin American Student Organization,” she said, “but I like that just because it’s a nice place to come and be able to kind of, you know, there has to be a time where you go and talk to people who identify with your culture or know who you are and how your family works, and just like the cultural things you were surrounded by when you grew up.” Cindy also joined the Association for Latin Professionals of America as a way to reinforce her goals and plans and remind her that she is not alone in her pursuit, particularly as she strides ahead of her parents and other family members.

The social justice programming that is associated with minority student centers is a legacy of previous generations of students who had to become student activists to get such centers instituted on their campuses.¹³ In an article that was aptly titled “In Defense of Themselves,” Joy Ann Williamson details how Black students needed to protest to initiate and reshape student services that would help ensure their survival at historically White colleges and universities. Because universities conceded minority-focused counterspaces to students in response to their demands for inclusion and equity, these spaces hold the potential, as organizational leadership researchers Garrett Hoffman and Tania Mitchell put it, “to foster student activist movements aimed at changing the structures and systems of exclusion and injustice.”¹⁴

There is important overlap between an institutional culture that reinforces equity and inclusion and institutionally supported student organizations for civic and activist identity development. As Cindy’s comments below reveal, her identity as a Latinx woman and her desire to seek racial-ethnic justice are not positioned in opposition to the institutional culture. In fact, her institution’s culture propelled Cindy through social justice opportunities in coursework, extracurricular activities, and an overall climate that embraces and encourages students to seek justice on campus and in society at large. “The whole stereotypical college party social scene is not my cup of tea, far from,” she said, “so my social life consists of progressing myself, developing myself as an intellectual, as a human being, becoming aware of what’s going on in society and then helping others do the same.”

She joined the Minority Alliance for Progress Chicago; started off as the event coordinator, bringing in speakers to shed light on “positive things that people of color have done in the past and in the present and can do in the future.” The speakers also helped to shed light “on controversial topics that people don’t generally sit and have a conversation about over lunch.” The group focused on social activism, hearing from a former Black Panther party leader and “a lot of different minority groups from the university to come and just talk about activism as a whole,” she said. “I thrive on things like that. I live to further my experiences and further my knowledge on topics like that and also help other individuals be enlightened.”

Roderick Watts and colleagues argue that opportunity structures—spaces that offer occasions for youth from marginalized backgrounds to practice leadership and civic skills—are necessary components of sociopolitical development.¹⁵ The relationship between activist identity and opportunity structure is reciprocal. Students like Cindy are initially drawn to activism through racial-ethnic justice organizations because of their growing social-justice-oriented perspectives. Equally, these organizations function as opportunity structures, where students like Cindy can further mature in their understanding of social and political oppression and develop skills that support political activism.

Inspired by the organizations and what she was learning, Cindy was determined to counter anti-Black and other forms of racism, and strive for social justice more broadly through activism and social actions. Black and Latinx issues, she said, were “very similar.”

Cindy’s sense of power comes from becoming part of something larger than what her individual actions could achieve.

In sharp contrast, Faith was not integrated into minority-focused counterspaces on her campus, though, as she said, the “majority of my friends are Black.” For Faith, race-ethnicity was a suppressed component of her sense of self, which made campus counterspaces that were created for Black students less appealing.

In some respects, Faith saw any form of self-segregation as a step back. She would not, she told a friend, walk in the separate graduation held for Black students. When her friend challenged her, saying that Blacks have fought for the ability to do just that, she disagreed.

Faith exhibits what Robert Sellers and colleagues call the multidimensional nature of racial-ethnic identity.¹⁶ Faith consistently reinforces a high regard for the Black community. At the same time, she does not want blackness to be a central or defining component of her identity. Research finds that Black students for whom race-ethnicity is less central to their identity participate in fewer Black-centered campus organizations.¹⁷ Faith’s desire to explore friendships and experiences beyond her racial-ethnic group does not inherently undermine her understanding of systems of racism or her desire to see those systems dismantled. At the same time, she did not have the benefits of a sense of collective identity that counterspaces can nurture—the feeling that one is neither alone nor powerless.

Cindy’s and Faith’s visceral responses to racially-ethnically motivated violence were the same, but their scholar-activist identities, and distinct paths to those identities, diverged. Cindy was an advocate, for herself in the college application process and then for others in her activism. With the death of her cousin, Cindy had personally experienced the effects of racially-ethnically motivated state-sanctioned violence. Although Faith had no immediately similar experience, she still experienced instances of interpersonal discrimination related to police brutality. Both women displayed critical awareness of racial-ethnic-based injustice. But they differed in the extent to which this critical awareness matured into critical consciousness—the ability to analyze the root structural factors that perpetuate racially and ethnically motivated violence and discrimination and engage an action-based response. Faith stopped at the level of critical awareness.

Faith hesitated at becoming strongly identified with a racial-ethnic-based sociopolitical cause. When Black Lives Matters protests swept the campus, Faith “didn’t want to put myself in a position where I could jeopardize my future because they had a lot of, they had the SWAT outside on the campus. They [the protesters] blocked the expressway, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t in support, I was just tryin’ to stay protected.” Faith, although critically aware of injustice, was cautious about political activism, particularly the ramifications of high-risk activism for her future.¹⁸

Cindy, in contrast, was energized by the thought of protesting. She stood out as someone who entered college ready to be engaged. She was highly efficacious, believed that she and her friends could and would make a difference and right the wrongs of systems of injustice. She came to college aware of some of the issues and hungry for more information and involvement in social justice movements. Research has found that those who engage in high-risk activism also have higher racial-ethnic centrality, and adhere to beliefs about the importance of social responsibility to the community.¹⁹ All in all, Cindy and Faith show how students can have similar internal reactions to racial-ethnic oppression but differ in their activist identities and actions because of individual aspects of their developmental histories and embeddedness with identity-affirming supports.

College students all over the world have answered and led many calls for social justice changes, from the 1960s civil rights movement to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 to the 2010 Arab Spring. Although university administrators cannot predict the societal issues that will emerge, they can be aware of how various subpopulations of students may be differently affected and inclined to respond.²⁰ To that end, universities can create campuses that prepare students with skills and worldviews that enable them to critically assess justice, equity, and inclusion, and then make strategic decisions about whether, when, and how to engage in activism, while also advancing their academic careers. As students’ awareness of social injustice grows in tandem with their desire to engage in activism to address such injustices, colleges and universities must shoulder the responsibility of supporting student development in alignment with institutional missions that promote civic engagement.²¹