11

(Dis)integration

Facilitating Integration by Carefully Attending to Difference

Colleges and universities can take a range of positions toward the broad category of identity-conscious supports, and identity-affirming counterspaces in particular. Any given institution’s position would likely be associated with its active commitment to advancing interactional diversity. Institutions that take a matter-of-fact position regarding lack of structural and interactional diversity would more likely attempt to neutralize students’ attempts to create counterspaces. Institutions that believe that the job has been accomplished once they have enrolled a statically diverse cohort would more likely place the burden of creating and sustaining counterspaces on historically marginalized students. Institutions that recognize that historical marginalization is often sustained by present-day disenfranchisement, discrimination, and stereotyping would more likely provide resources and opportunities to create and normalize formal and informal counterspaces.

Advocating for identity-conscious supports and campus counterspaces as one specific category of such supports does not negate the importance of academic preparation and the role of K–12 schools in ensuring that historically marginalized students arrive on campus ready to engage in college-level work. Differing academic preparation is a significant factor in racial-ethnic gaps in college persistence.¹ Schools vary widely in their educational resources and course offerings, and these variations are strongly associated with the racial-ethnic composition of the student body.² Among the 533 students in our study, those who attended predominantly White high schools were much more likely to report that their high schools prepared them for college compared to those who attended predominantly non-White high schools.

The question is whether academic preparation is enough. The research-based consensus says no.³ Black and Latinx students have lower college grade point averages (GPAs) and are less likely to graduate than White students, even after accounting for SAT and ACT scores and high school GPA.⁴ This is because even when ability and academic preparation are equal, Black and Latinx students have unequal access to the cultural and social resources that historically White colleges and universities require.⁵ However, when colleges and universities take proactive steps to provide identity-conscious supports, racial-ethnic differences in outcomes narrow considerably.⁶ As highlighted throughout this book, these cultural and social resources go beyond racial-ethnic identity to include how race-ethnicity is associated with the increased likelihood of having other marginalized social identities, such as being a first-generation student, a lower-income student, a commuting student, a working student, and a student from an immigrant household.

Black and Latinx students have responded to the call to go to college, but colleges and universities have been slow to change in response because they believed they could assimilate these students and remain unchanged.⁷ Higher education has shown itself to be a revolving door that puts too many Latinx and Black students right back outside their walls, with student debt and without a degree that would lead to the wages needed to service that debt. Although I foreground the persistence problem, the broader goal of campus counterspaces is fostering persistence coupled with psychological, emotional, and cultural well-being. Too many studies show that for historically marginalized students, educational success comes at a high personal cost.⁸

Diversity as a Process Rather Than an End Goal

For too many institutions, enrolling students from a diverse range of social categories has largely been the first and only step toward campus diversity. Because such universities perceive the goal as achieved once students enroll, they pay much less attention to the post-recruitment process. The result is universities with structural but not interactional diversity, an outcome that is evidenced by a reliance on enacting diversity through institutional statements rather than through institutional actions. As Claire said in chapter 4, it felt suspicious and insincere when Urban PrivateU-South administrators regularly touted their high level of campus diversity, given the difference between those statements and her experiences.

Research shows that, like Claire, students take note and interpret this overreliance on diversity statements as evidence of the institution’s token commitment to diversity.⁹ Students with both diverse and segregated friendship networks take note of when diversity is primarily enacted through institutional statements. The authors of Making Diversity Work on Campus call attention to this issue because students’ perceptions of the institution’s commitment to diversity affect their individual willingness to build relationships that cross racial-ethnic boundaries.¹⁰

As Julissa, profiled in chapter 2, said, the lack of interactional diversity is clearly visible to nearly anyone who paid an ounce of attention to the issue. The campus itself, bars and restaurants, and events were all typically segregated, she said.

This ease with which the lack of interactional diversity becomes visible means that administrators cannot say they did not know; they can, however, say they did not care to know.

Without taking steps to foster interactional diversity, institutions invite the negative outcome of structural diversity: increased levels of racial-ethnic conflict.¹¹ As noted in Making Diversity Work on Campus, “while racially diverse campuses provide important opportunities for teaching and learning that racially homogeneous campuses do not provide, they also present significant challenges that must be addressed if the educational benefits of campus diversity are to be achieved.”¹² The conflict itself is not the negative outcome. It is whether the institution uses that conflict to further productive understandings of others.¹³

Silvia Santos and colleagues found that one potential negative outcome of increased diversity is White students’ feelings of “identity threat,” that is, perceiving reverse discrimination, perceiving that their racial-ethnic identity is not valued, and that educational resources and supports are being diverted to members of racial-ethnic minority groups.¹⁴ The conflict or discomfort that comes from feeling that one’s assumed privileged position or perspective is not the standard can be used to spur self-reflection, perspective taking, and other aspects of interpersonal growth.

Instead of making productive use of these conflicts to further the institution’s commitment to diversity, many colleges and universities suppress and minimize the conflict. For example, one way that colleges have responded to critiques of race-conscious policies is by symbolically shifting their language to appear more race-inclusive and less race-conscious. Afeni Cobham and Tara Parker argue that after a brief flirtation with moving toward a race-conscious orientation, universities have pivoted and moved toward what I call false racial-inclusivity— celebrating similarities across racial-ethnic diversity and downplaying historical and contemporary differences in how race-ethnicity is experienced.¹⁵ As Cobham and Parker note, one manifestation of this is removing “minority” from the names of administrative offices designated to serve underrepresented students and replacing it with “diversity” or “multicultural.” My own university changed its “Office of Minority Student Affairs” to “Office of Multicultural Student Affairs” in 2007, and then to the nondescript “Center for Identity + Inclusion” in 2016.

In crafting a plan for diversity that is central to their educational and intellectual mission, universities should take stock of their efforts to avoid the trap of making statements about diversity instead of taking action. The expectation that students will somehow figure out how to overcome a lifetime of explicit and implicit biases and engage with diversity with minimal institutional supports is negligent.¹⁶

For administrators who do want to know more, begin by surveying your students and other members of your campus community. Campus climate surveys can provide insight into how perceptions and experiences of the campus differ based on several social categories that identify subgroups with a history of marginalization. I led the development of my institution’s 2016 campus climate survey, and the following examples are a good starting place. Students were asked to indicate their level of agreement with the following statements:

1. I feel that I belong at this university.
2. I feel welcomed at this university.
3. I feel valued by other students.
4. I feel valued by faculty.
5. Students of my race-ethnicity/gender identification/sexual orientation/religious affiliation are respected at this university.
6. I feel comfortable expressing my views regarding race/ethnicity.
7. Attending a diverse university is important to me.
8. I have considered transferring to another school because of my experiences of discrimination/harassment at this university.
9. I have considered not recommending this university to a prospective student because of my experiences of discrimination/harassment at this university.
10. Racial-ethnic/gender identification/sexual orientation/religious affiliation discrimination may have been a problem at this university in the past, but it is not a problem today.

It is important to examine how responses to these questions differ by several social status categories. Some students may experience marginalization due to their race-ethnicity, for others it may be class-based, and yet others may feel that their gender identification or religious affiliation is the marginalizing aspect of who they are.

In the remainder of this chapter I offer a few critical actions for universities to engage racial-ethnic diversity that is simultaneously about repairing past injustices while creating a more equitable and inclusive future.

Structuring Diversity into Campus Orientation Programs

Those who argue for identity-blind campus integration believe that people’s group identities can be submerged either by stripping away salient group markers so that students think of themselves only as individuals or by creating a new single group institutional identity so that students think only of being part of the institution.¹⁷ However, as we have highlighted throughout this book, color-blind integration defies students’ lived experiences.¹⁸ Color-blind integration ignores power, privilege, and inequality, factors that are intimately tied to students’ experiences of race-ethnicity on campus. Color-blind integration is complicit with the idea that the historically privileged group’s culture is the superordinate identity into which all others should be subsumed.¹⁹ Consequently, color-blind integration can only occur in theory and never in practice.

Recognizing the futility of asking historically marginalized students to submerge their cultural or group identities under some larger humanist or institutional identity, Patricia Gurin and her colleagues argue instead for supporting students to maintain intragroup solidarity while developing intergroup alliances; neither is done at the expense of the other.²⁰ Social psychologists who believe that historically marginalized students need identity-conscious supports to succeed in college argue for difference-education interventions.²¹ These interventions provide students with insight into how their different backgrounds matter for the challenges they will likely experience and the resources they will need to succeed. In addition, they explicitly and implicitly communicate that it is OK to self-acknowledge the aspects of one’s social identities that may make one’s college experience different from that of the idealized traditional college student. Difference interventions can be programs that focus on a single identity group, where students focus solely on the experiences of others like themselves and learn success strategies that take their identity into consideration. However, they can also be done as intergroup programs that simultaneously engage students’ belonging to a range of identity groups to explore how each identity characteristic can shape the college experience.

Nicole Stephens and colleagues detail a one-hour difference-education intervention held early in the first year that reduced the achievement gap between first- and continuing-generation students by 63 percent. It also reduced first-generation students’ stress and anxiety and increased their academic and social engagement. In the intervention, incoming students heard from first- and continuing-generation seniors about how they adjusted to and found success in college. Seniors discussed their social class backgrounds and how it affected their precollege and college-going experiences, and, in turn, how those experiences determined the resources they lacked and supports they needed to succeed. Stephens concludes that “the intervention provided students with the critical insight that people’s different backgrounds matter, and that people with backgrounds like theirs can succeed when they use the right kinds of tools and strategies… . Specifically, difference-education can help students to make sense of the source of their particular experiences in college and, at the same time, equip them with the tools they need to manage and overcome the challenges their different backgrounds might present.”²²

Because there is no one profile of the Latinx student or the Black student, there is no one answer for how colleges should respond to the needs of their increasingly diverse student bodies. The educational benefits of diversity can only be achieved by living in the dynamic space of recognizing both the individual and the group, and not placing the needs of one group as subordinate to another.

Curricular Diversity

Universities are sorely lacking in diverse curricular offerings. To many, it is surprising to hear that the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities are lacking in curricular diversity. Yes, there are literally thousands of courses offered each year at each institution. However, almost all of those courses use a colonial framework—course syllabi dominated by the intellectual and scientific contributions of White scholars, particularly White men. To spur change, several student petitions have called for “decolonizing the college curriculum.”²³

In response, most administrators point to their racial-ethnic studies offerings, but this relegates curricular diversity to the limited number of electives that students have space for or to the limited number of students who major in a racial-ethnic studies discipline. Racial-ethnic studies courses have been and are the lifeblood of academic counterspaces, where, while engaging in core intellectual activities, racial-ethnic minority students reduce their feelings of cultural isolation on campus, develop critical cultural identity, and build supportive student-faculty relationships.²⁴ However, curricular diversity must be envisioned in more expansive ways and include seemingly identity-neutral fields such as mathematics, ostensibly universalist fields such as psychology, and traditionally colonial fields such as history and political science.

Only a limited number of research articles and books can be covered in any one course, and this limited set of readings is often composed of the seminal articles that have always been used and more recent articles by the professor’s known network of contemporaries. Given this, to achieve curricular diversity, universities should diversify their faculty. Faculty who come from historically marginalized groups would be more likely to broaden the range of articles considered seminal to any given field and have a more diverse network of contemporary colleagues from which to draw.

Minority students have long reported that their perspectives and experiences are not represented in college curricula.²⁵ Imagine the increased sense of membership that historically marginalized students would experience if the intellectual contributions of members of their groups were explicitly integrated into the syllabus. Priyamvada Gopal, a faculty member at the University of Cambridge, writes in the Guardian in October 2017 of the impact of such a curriculum. “A decolonized curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.” She argues that education should enable self-understanding for all students and enable understanding of others, and this can only be done if the intellectual contributions of members from all social groups are deliberatively integrated into the curriculum.

Interactional Diversity

There is now a clear consensus that structural diversity does not lead to interactional diversity without intentional institutional action.²⁶ Structural diversity should be seen as a prerequisite to creating campus environments that deliberately teach students how to identify and move beyond their biases, understand broad group differences as well as the diversity of individuals within groups, and develop meaningful interpersonal relationships across group boundaries. These are skills, not natural inclinations nor character traits, and because of the segregated nature of American K–12 schools, most college students lack these skills on arrival.²⁷

Fostering interactional diversity is a critical aspect of preventing the negative aspects of structural diversity. For White students, increased social interactions with students of other racial-ethnic groups increase their likelihood of holding positive views about multiculturalism on campus and valuing the goals of promoting diversity.²⁸ The nature of majority and minority experiences in any given society is such that interactions with diverse groups may be particularly beneficial for students who belong to the majority group. This is because they are less likely to have encountered views that contradict their worldviews than people who belong to minority groups. For racial-ethnic minority students, fostering interactional diversity reduces their feelings of isolation on campus and results in a more successful first-year transition.²⁹

Fostering interactional diversity has both campus-wide and individual student benefits.³⁰ On campus, interactional diversity has broad normative effects, such that campuses with higher levels of interactional diversity also have greater student appreciation and awareness of persons from other racial-ethnic groups. That said, the benefits of interacting with others of another race-ethnicity is greater on campuses with more segregation. In other words, students benefit most from opportunities to interact across racial-ethnic boundaries on campuses where students primarily interact with their own racial-ethnic group.³¹

Nicholas Bowman examined more than fifty studies and concluded that the effect of diversity on students is determined by the level of peer interaction with diverse individuals, particularly interactions outside the classroom.³² Frequent interactions with diverse peers is positively related to a range of student outcomes, from civic attitudes and behaviors to cognitive outcomes, such complex thinking and problem-solving skills. Josipa Roksa and colleagues believe that this cognitive growth is spurred by interpersonal encounters that provide experiences and information that are different or discrepant from one’s previous experiences.³³ Nida Denson and Mitchell Chang conclude that “although interactions with diverse others may initially seem more difficult and effortful than interactions with similar others, they are associated with several benefits.”³⁴

Given the importance of interactional diversity, I highlight several promising actions that universities can take to enhance the quantity and quality of intergroup social interactions.³⁵

1. Semi-informal, facilitated events to help students gain the tools for cross race-ethnicity dialogue while also building friendships.
2. Peer education that uses older students with diverse peer networks to educate incoming students of their same race-ethnicity about diversity issues. This approach increases student comfort with discussing sensitive topics.
3. Intentional community-building efforts using repeated interactions that sustain the level of interaction necessary to build genuine friendships.

Meaningful and sustained interaction, and not simple proximity, are crucial. Theories regarding the psychological processes that lead to changes in attitudes or biases toward members of other groups, particularly stigmatized groups, emphasize how knowledge about a group, emotional or affective ties with group members, and experiences alter one’s perceptions of group members.³⁶ Essentially, there is little utility to recruiting a statistically diverse student body without taking the next steps of fostering interactional diversity.

Counterspaces

So why, after arguing for the importance of interactional diversity, do I close this book by re-emphasizing the need for institutionally supported counterspaces for students with minoritized, marginalized, and stigmatized identities? Counterspaces, particularly physical counterspaces, do promote the separation and segregation of subgroups of students from the broader institution. However, it is for brief periods of time and for the strategic purpose of helping students develop the adaptive coping resources and skills that enable them to re-emerge and engage more fully with the broader institution.

As Tabitha Grier-Reed notes, racial-ethnic supports are needed to counter racial-ethnic stress.³⁷ Charles R. Lawrence, one of the founding critical race theorists, notes that in the absence of deep and meaningful campus diversity historically marginalized students—and faculty—turn to counterspaces for a community of “trusted friends, [where one can] seek refuge and dress wounds of battle and places for hard conversations, where differences can be aired and strategy mapped, where we can struggle with and affirm one another.”³⁸ Later, Lori Patton used this quote to capture her belief that campus culture centers, such as the Black or Latin American Student Unions, provide spaces of resistance against identity disaffirming campus experiences.³⁹ I use this quote to signify that counterspaces are critical spaces where marginalized students challenge each other to push beyond stereotypical narratives, develop counterstories, and learn adaptive strategies from others who are navigating similar struggles. Essentially, counterspaces take many forms—ideational, physical, curricular, cocurricular, formal, and informal—and do many things. They counter discrimination, build critical group identity, become culturally affirming while fostering institutional belonging, provide psychological and physical safety, support academic achievement, and provide a social community.⁴⁰

What I have gathered from media coverage and conversations with colleagues who oppose racial-ethnic counterspaces, as well as from a few scholarly articles on this topic, is that opposers tend to equate being admitted to college with being welcomed and integrated into campus life. As discussed in chapter 1, when one’s understanding of discrimination and oppression is personal (only personal engagement in blatant and overt acts of discrimination are considered) and ahistoric (there are no current laws or formal policies that directly disadvantage historically marginalized groups) and when structural factors are ignored, one can easily claim that discrimination and oppression are nonissues. Under this thinking, institutionally supported counterspaces are perceived as unfairly “catering” to students from historically marginalized groups.⁴¹

Based on this belief that enrollment equates to full inclusion, opposers imagine that students who choose to participate in counterspaces are choosing to separate and segregate themselves from this imagined inclusive campus community. Consequently, when students of color “are observed associating with each other, their same-race affiliations are lamented in the public and private discourse as the cause for the racial balkanization of college campuses… . In other words … affiliating with your own racial-ethnic group in college is presumed to have a negative influence”⁴² However, there is no truth to the myth that campus segregation is due to the actions of minority student self-segregation. The empirical evidence is clear: minority students are much more likely than White students to have both casual social interactions and close friendships that cross racial-ethnic boundaries.⁴³ Each and every time counterspaces are threatened, unwavering acknowledgment of the fact that racial-ethnic minority students have the highest levels of diverse campus interactions would go a long way to demonstrating institutional recognition of the true nature of campus segregation.

This discrepancy in perception is also found among students; counterspaces appear to be perceived differently based on whether students feel that members of their identity group are threatened versus welcomed on campus.⁴⁴ White students are more likely to view explicitly racially-ethnically marked organizations in negative, segregationist terms and experience their existence on campus as obstacles to meaningful intergroup relationships. In contrast, minority students view these organizations as a means of self-affirmation and growth, both of which increase their likelihood of social engagement with majority spaces on campus. And, as discussed in chapters 4 and 7, racial-ethnic minority students experience many of the university’s long-standing organizations as implicitly marked White spaces from which they are actively excluded.

White student segregation is fostered in these long-standing unmarked White spaces that are seen as simply part of the history of the institution. As the authors of Making Diversity Work on Campus concluded, “It is important to note that historically White colleges and universities have a much longer history of exclusion than they do of inclusion and that this history continues to shape racial-ethnic dynamics on our campuses. One product of this history of exclusion is that, on many campuses, benefits sustained for particular groups go unrecognized and often work to the detriment of groups that have been historically excluded by the institution.”⁴⁵ Again, the point is understanding that racial-ethnic counterspaces, and counterspaces for other subgroups of students, developed in response to feelings of exclusion, marginalization, and alienation.

Racial-ethnic minority students also need counterspaces because in those spaces their race-ethnicity fades into the background. The students interviewed noted the relief they felt while in such spaces and on realizing that their adjustment and integration challenges were normal. Counterspaces ensure that minority students do not have to struggle alone. They allow students to share empathy as well as information. As a result, students were better able to cope with the challenge of being othered. For historically marginalized students to take full advantage of the learning opportunities that abound on college campuses, they need to feel comfortable exposing their vulnerabilities, asking questions, and making mistakes. As discussed in chapter 6, for Black and Latinx students this requires a context where they feel that they will not be judged more harshly than their White peers who make similar mistakes, and their accomplishments will not be dismissed as exceptions.

When one is the only member, or one of only a few, of a marginalized social group in a given context, experiencing identity-threatening microaggressions can lead to withdrawal and avoidance coping.⁴⁶ This is because being in the extreme numerical minority places students in the untenable position of having to choose between ignoring the microaggression or responding and risk being singled out as too sensitive, someone who sees racism and discrimination in innocuous comments, or as someone who manipulatively plays the race card. Several researchers have noted this Catch-22 dilemma.⁴⁷ Being tagged with any of these labels has potential negative ramifications for students’ educational and professional careers. Counterspaces enable healthy shared processing of microaggressions. Marginalized students can share and deconstruct their experiences, obtain emotional validation through the recognition of shared experiences, obtain critical insight, and develop adaptive coping.

Counterspaces also provided the Black and Latinx students in our study with compensatory supports they needed to counterbalance the low-quality guidance that many reported receiving from White academic advisers and professors. The majority of the students we interviewed first went to their assigned advisers, teaching assistants, and campus-wide academic support centers. They received advice and academic supports that were somewhat helpful but did little to consider the aspects of their precollege experiences, current circumstances, and aspirations that differed from those of the idealized college student. At times, those institutional agents only increased the students’ feelings of academic inferiority. Students pointed to the gap between their and the institutional agent’s racial-ethnic and class backgrounds as the reason for the limited guidance and support received. As Aliyah noted of the teaching assistant’s favorites in chapter 6,

The higher quality of guidance and support that happens between White institutional agents and White students goes unacknowledged, because White institutional agents are presented as racially-ethnically neutral. However, minority students do not experience them as racially-ethnically neutral.

As Derick Brooms found, Black male students credited a counterspace for Black males with providing access to critical campus resources. “Although [the black men] asserted that many of the resources were in place already for all students, they felt disconnected from many of these opportunities or shared that they held little to no knowledge on how to access them.”⁴⁸ The counterspace created Black male peer networks that shared strategies and resources for overcoming challenges, while simultaneously building members’ sense of self and collective identity in ways that inspired and motivated their academic efforts.

I cannot close this book without directly addressing the claim that racial-ethnic minority counterspaces are divisive spaces. Counterspaces are only divisive spaces to the extent that the culture of the institution presents racial-ethnic minority students with the false choice of identifying with and belonging to the larger institution versus finding their micro-community of local campus belonging. Campus belonging, at least for racial-ethnic minority students, is a fluid process that involves student agency in making dynamic decisions about when they do and do not identify with the larger institution versus their micro-community on campus.⁴⁹ When students feel that they do not belong to the larger institution, they take active steps to locate or create localized belonging on campus. For minority students, this may mean going between majority and minority spaces based on needs that are satisfied, neglected, and marginalized in each space.

Counterspaces are not a panacea for increasing Black and Latinx students’ college persistence. Institutional, family, and individual differences all played a role in the extent to which students used physical, social, and ideological counterspaces to successfully counter social identity threats and maintain belonging to their communities of origin while also developing a strong sense of belonging on campus. It is also important to moderate expectations that all racial-ethnic minority students will welcome counterspaces as an adaptive coping support, as shown in the preceding chapters. In addition, for too many of the students interviewed, it was clear that although counterspaces were supportive, in the absence of substantial alleviation of financial distress, these students yet risked joining the ranks of those who leave college with debt and no degree. However, even with these caveats, without counterspaces, historically marginalized students are left to their own individual coping resources to navigate a system that is dominated by implicit unwritten cultural and political rules.

As Benjamin Bowser and his colleagues state,

By providing historically marginalized students with identity-affirming supports, administrators are institutionalizing mechanisms that simultaneously acknowledge and challenge “sedimented or past-in-present racial formations where unquestioned racial ideologies create understandings that appear to be the natural and inevitable.”⁵¹ Counterspaces facilitate radical growth—coming together to first affirm one’s marginalized identities so one can then critique deficit and deviant representations of those identities, for the strategic purpose of developing new counternarratives.