Introduction

It Doesn’t Have to Be Race-Ethnicity to Be about Race-Ethnicity

The costs of college extend far beyond the financial costs of attendance. There are opportunity costs in the form of forgone employment, and psychosocial costs in the form of stress, depression, and anxiety. These financial, forgone opportunity, and psychosocial costs disproportionately accrue to students from historically marginalized groups. This is because the costs are greatest for students who need to juggle both school and paid employment, are experiencing financial distress, do not see themselves reflected in the larger student body and faculty, are less integrated into campus life, and experience a cultural gap between their precollege and college contexts. Understanding these and other psychosocial costs is of increasing importance because researchers have established that ability, academic preparation, and financial resources explain only part of the variation in college persistence.¹

In an effort to improve our understanding of the psychosocial factors that affect minority student persistence, I have been tracking a cohort of approximately five hundred Black and Latinx college freshmen who enrolled in fall 2013. My initial thought was to write a book about financial distress—the effect of inadequate financial resources on campus belonging and commitment to educational goals, as well as heightened doubts about whether college will pay off. However, many researchers have soundly made the case for how the escalating financial cost of college and convoluted financial aid policies fail students.² Instead, I focused on how the “college for all” narrative fails students by indiscriminately pushing many to enroll in colleges with very low graduation rates just for the satisfaction and relief of being counted among the college-going population. But that plan, too, was swept aside after being inundated with news articles skeptical of minority students’ “imagined” campus microaggressions and mischaracterizations of their desire for safe spaces as self-infantilizing. Those for and against safe spaces are miles apart in their perception of oppression in America. Popular debates position on one side White Americans, 69 percent of whom believe that Black Americans are now treated the same as White Americans, and on the other side Black Americans, 59 percent of whom believe that Black Americans continue to be treated worse than White Americans.³

News articles describing historically marginalized students as “fragile and perpetually vulnerable to victimization,” as George F. Will put it in the Washington Post in October 2016, contrasted sharply with what I was hearing in my annual interviews with seventy Black and Latinx students. None of my students’ voices were represented among the victimized students portrayed in these news articles and op-eds. None of the students in my study were asking to be “protected” from new ideas. Instead, as reflected in the statements of one Latinx female student, they relished exposure to new ideas: “I just love having—which I’ve never had before—being able to sit down with [students] and discussing social issues or political issues and really intellectual conversations that I’ve never been exposed to before, and for them to enlighten me with new information. I love that.” However, these students were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that simultaneously validate and critique one’s interconnected self and group identity—that would enable radical growth. Radical growth can be understood as the development of ideas and narratives that challenge dominant representations of and notions about their marginalized identities. It is these needs and opportunities for radical growth that I explore in this book.

The interviews also revealed that many Black and Latinx students were unaware of their need for identity-affirming counterspaces. Students like Marcela, a Latinx female student who personifies resilience. Because of housing instability, she attended three high schools but still graduated on time with a 3.5 grade point average, and scored in the ninety-fifth percentile of the ACT test. However, despite obtaining a “free ride” to a selective private liberal arts university, she left halfway through the second quarter of her first year.

Unlike most of the Black and Latinx students in my study, Marcela expressed that she had no social adjustment and no financial challenges: “I’m multiracial, but I mostly identify really as Hispanic, and I never felt out of place, I never felt uncomfortable speaking to anyone else, so with racial diversity and LGBTQ, even that, everything. Totally tolerant. Everyone’s easygoing and fun. Classes were awesome, and the professors were amazing. And the coursework was just fun to do.”

Unlike most, her transition to college meant an increase in financial resources, and she enjoyed the accompanying sense of independence: “It was nice to feel like [I was paying my way] through my financial aid or scholarships, ’cause ever since I was fourteen I’ve been living with different people, and I’ve always been dependent on someone, only being able to contribute a really small amount.” Unlike most college students, Marcela did not struggle with suddenly being out from under parental monitoring. Her mother had a debilitating brain tumor when she was age ten. “I haven’t been living with parents for a lot of years now, since the beginning of high school. Through all of high school I was completely in control of my time, when I did my homework, and things like that.” But what did trip her up was the newness of the experience. Like most students, she struggled adjusting to the new academic expectations, and her struggles were compounded by the lack of a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school. “I had never done anything like that before. I never had to write a paper above three to four pages, and all of a sudden I had to write papers that were like ten pages. I also expected, I did so well in high school that I expected to just be doing the exact same way in college, and it’s really discouraging… . [In high school] I wouldn’t sleep to get whole assignments done the night before. So in college I had those same habits. And that just didn’t work at all for college.”

Unlike students with college-educated parents, Marcela had no one to assure her that her struggles were a normal part of the transition. She had no one to offer strategies for managing the workload or encourage her to access campus supports. Her mother was the first and only member of her immediate and extended family to obtain a college degree; however, her mother’s poor health left Marcela unsupported in the college transition:

This brings us to one of several moments during the interview where it was clear that, through glimpses into her friends’ experiences, Marcela knew that there was insider knowledge she did not have access to. She contrasted her family’s advice with the advice received from her best college friend, who had college-educated parents: “[My] friend encouraged me to try and stay because she told me about how she also felt feelings of dropping out, but she talked to her mom, and her mom told her all these [other] things.”

Leaving college early is not confined to only first-generation college students. I have several friends and acquaintances with advanced degrees, and have heard stories of others, who have called their children home partway through the first year upon realizing that the ship was sinking fast. Each case involved skilled negotiations with the school to ensure that grants and scholarships would still be in place when the children returned. Unlike the children of my friends and acquaintances, Marcela was unable to pick up where she left off. She has since restarted at a community college and no longer has any grants or scholarships.

During the months after leaving college, Marcela struggled to find a job and learned many lessons that cemented her decision to return to college. Key among them was a personalized understanding of why she needed a college degree.

These lessons now form the ideological buoys supporting her second attempt.

I begin with Marcela, a student who did not express any direct racial-ethnic identity challenges during the transition to college, because even though Latinx and Black students’ college-going identity challenges are often deeply connected to their sense of themselves as Black or Latinx students, many of these challenges are not directly about their racial-ethnic identity. Instead, many of their college-going identity challenges result from structural racism—an intergenerational system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work to perpetuate racial-ethnic inequity.⁴ In this system, Marcela was able to feel free of interpersonal discrimination and still experience systemic inequities in her academic and other college-relevant identities.

So what’s race-ethnicity got to do with it? Many of the identity challenges that Latinx and Black students experience result from how race-ethnicity increases the likelihood that they are also first-generation college students; that they attended high schools that did not offer a rigorous college preparatory curriculum; that they have to work for pay to afford college; that they cannot be carefree students and must help support the families they left behind; and that they must contend with many other nontraditional college student challenges.

The aim of this book is to challenge the status quo, which is that despite the proliferation of diversity initiatives, the “overriding assumption is that the dominant White [middle- and upper-class] culture through which the university environment functions is working and requires no adjustment.”⁵ Furthermore, because universities claim to be non-oppressive spaces, the dominant narrative is that any racial-ethnic inequalities result from supposed non-racial, non-ethnic factors such as income and academic preparation. However, universities fail to connect these supposed non-racial, non-ethnic factors to the historical oppression and continued discrimination of historically subjugated racial-ethnic groups. Consequently, most diversity policies revolve around tolerance—the acceptance of an allowable amount of variation—and aim to help historically marginalized students adjust in ways that leave the institution’s culture largely unchallenged and unchanged.

Throughout this book, you will encounter descriptions that make the invisible visible by the highlighting of experiences of cultural “deviants”—students who fall outside normative assumptions of who college students should be. This is because normative cultural expectations are most visible when they conflict with the experiences of cultural deviants.

The book unfolds as follows.

In chapter 1, I present the problem and briefly describe the data used to gain insight into how challenges to Black and Latinx students’ college-going identity threaten their persistence.

In chapter 2, I lay out the argument for shifting social identities from the margin to the center of how universities engage with students from historically marginalized groups. I do this by showing that even when minority students intentionally attempt to “move beyond” their social identities and embody a humanist identity, they are regularly tripped up by how they are identified by others, and by the psychic energy they must expend to deny, to themselves, their experiences of prejudice. A colleague of mine likens this to “to standing in the rain while attempting to deny that one is getting wet.”

Each subsequent chapter examines a particular social identity or intersection of identities and explores how it is experienced, understood, internalized, rejected, or reorganized during the transition and adjustment to college life. Each chapter also examines how various aspects of the campus context affect the stereotypes, roles, and academic risks and supports that are associated with a given social identity. As expected, some social identities are affirmed at historically White colleges and universities and are associated with feelings of inclusion and an unquestioned embrace of the institution, while other identities are rendered inferior or invisible and are associated with feelings of exclusion and resistance of the institution. In counterspaces, identities that are rendered inferior or invisible in the larger campus culture are explored, critiqued, and deepened, and sometimes claimed for the first time.

Chapter 3, coauthored with Resney Gugwor, delves into how financial distress is associated with how students make sense of the “opportunity” to attend college. Many of the financially distressed students believed they had to attend college to secure their economic futures but doubted that obtaining their degree would ensure financial stability. Their experiences illustrate the large role that one’s relative financial position plays in identity and sense of belonging on campus.

Chapter 4, coauthored with Ja’Dell Davis, provides an intersectional perspective on gendered racial-ethnic identities (a gender identity that is racialized and a racial-ethnic identity that is gendered), with a focus on experiences of intellectual invalidation. Black women were the most likely to report these alienating campus experiences, and many responded with identity-protection coping strategies that led them to disconnect from campus life or limit their engagement to activities that affirmed their gendered racial-ethnic identity.

Chapter 5, coauthored with Elan Hope, provides insight into how Black and Latinx students navigated their identity as activists during a period in American history when social media documentation of racially-ethnically motivated violence made it impossible to pretend that America had entered a post-racial state of consciousness. There was little variation in how these students felt about police brutality and the targeting of Latinx deportation; almost all were disturbed, most were outraged. However, there was variation in the public visibility of their response and engagement with activism.

Chapter 6, coauthored with Carly Offidani-Bertrand, turns to the role of racial-ethnic identity-based campus organizations in helping or hindering students to manage feelings of being othered. Students’ perspectives on being othered ranged from feeling that their peers appreciated their differences to feeling stereotyped as the sole representative of their group. The extent to which they had counterspaces helped them process those feelings and celebrate their differences as diversity.

Chapter 7, coauthored with Gabriel Velez, illustrates the diverse social identities that are developed in racial-ethnic, identity-based campus organizations. Students listed race-ethnicity as the focus of their initial attraction to these organizations. However, they came to embed themselves in these organizations because the organizations also developed other aspects of their identities, such as their professional, political, and academic identities. This chapter also highlights students who explicitly sought to embed themselves in organizations and clubs that were not connected with their racial-ethnic identity.

Chapter 8, coauthored with Hilary Tackie and Elan Hope, takes up the issue of how and where commuter students, students who do not have access to peer support through living on campus, locate their sense of campus belonging. When students lack a “place” on campus, they are more likely to adopt a functional (“I go to school”) identity rather than an all-encompassing (“I am a student”) identity. We show how this status is both an identification and an identity.

Chapter 9, coauthored with Emily Lyons, considers the processes of constructing an academic identity for first-generation students. This chapter discusses challenges to building an academic identity among first-generation college students, both for those whose parents are unambiguously supportive of their child’s college attendance and those who are ambivalent. Parent ambivalence was particularly salient for first-generation, Latinx women with immigrant parents.

Chapter 10, coauthored with Tasneem Mandviwala, examines how the intersection of students’ race-ethnicity and gender is associated with their motivational orientation toward college. Students’ motivational orientations were evident in their reasons for going to college and in their adjustment struggles during the first year. This chapter focuses on how Latinx men’s motivational orientations can either align them with or place them at odds with their institutions’ dominant cultural orientation.

In the concluding chapter, I take a step back to examine the bigger picture and suggest ways that colleges and universities could achieve greater integration by attending to difference. Latinx and Black students’ college-going identity challenges are often created through institutional action and inaction, and can be resolved through institutional action.

A methodological appendix is provided for those who want deeper insight into how the data were collected, coded, and analyzed.

But first I present simple definitions for a few key terms. Black is used as a racial-ethnic category to refer to a wide range of ethnic groups of African descent. Latinx is used as a gender-neutral racial-ethnic category to refer to a wide range of ethnic groups of Hispanic and Latin American descent. White is used as a racial-ethnic category to refer to a wide range of ethnic groups of European descent. Also, it is important to explicitly discuss how the racialization of Latinx people in the United States leads to our hyphenation of “race-ethnicity” throughout this book. Latinxs in the United States, unless they can visually, linguistically, and culturally pass as White, are members of a racialized group.⁶ Individuals identified as Latinx are essentialized as having one pan-ethnic culture that is placed low in the American status hierarchy and are thus racialized as a non-White group.

Throughout this book the term historically rather than predominantly White college and university is used because it is about much more than the demographic composition of these institutions that make them hostile places for historically underrepresented students.⁷ It is as Patricia Hill Collins has written, the “sedimented or past-in-present [discriminatory] formations where unquestioned ideologies create understandings that appear to be the natural and inevitable.”⁸ Historically White colleges and universities are the focus of my research because only about 8 percent of Black and 13 percent of Latinx students attend minority-serving colleges and universities.⁹

All names of students, universities, campus organizations, and other proper names are pseudonyms. Identifying aspects such as number of siblings, major, campus job, and parents’ occupations have been modified in ways that maintain the accuracy of the narrative while also preserving anonymity.

The pseudonyms for the historically White colleges and universities are “Rural StateU” for a large (somewhat intimidatingly large), rural, flagship state school; “Urban StateU” for a midsize, highly ranked, state school located near the center of Chicago; “Suburban StateU” for a midsize, state-funded, research university located in a distant suburb of Chicago; and “Urban PrivateU-North” and “Urban PrivateU-South” for two liberal arts private colleges in Chicago. Although I do not identify the school of attendance, small details such as rural, urban, or suburban location, the level of minority enrollment, and students’ own descriptions of their schools often make each student’s institution easily identifiable. This further emphasizes the need to adjust specific details about certain cases to ensure that students remain anonymous. As shown in figure 1 below, the full extent to which Black and Latinx students, particularly men, are a marginalized presence on their campuses can only be seen when looked at in relation to the full undergraduate student body.