7

Finding One’s People and One’s Self on Campus

The Role of Extracurricular Organizations

With Gabriel Velez

Within the first few weeks of life as a college student, young adults must adjust to new living arrangements or commuting schedules, decide on a handful of classes to take from a course book that can span hundreds of pages, and meet hundreds of new peers, advisers, and professors. They must also adjust to much less contact with family and friends. This vacuum leaves college students searching for new sources of social support—the people who will anchor who students think they are and whom they want to become. Thankfully, a flurry of orientation activities offers opportunities for first-year students to become acquainted with the vast array of extracurricular activities that will help them “follow your passions, form friendships, learn new skills, network professionally and—of course—enjoy yourself.”¹

Activity fairs offer a dizzying array of clubs, organizations, sports, activities, and volunteer opportunities. The buffet of options alone may be overwhelming, and many college students see this as a high-stakes choice. Extracurricular activities are now a fundamental part of the college experience, with even more significance than classes for some students.² As one parent of a high school senior put it when asked about her daughter’s likely major in college, “I have accepted that she is going to college for the social network, and will figure out the major and career stuff along the way.”

This emphasis on networking and extracurricular activities begins long before students set foot on campus. During junior year of high school, students sit through presentations on finding their college fit and are repeatedly told that college is not just for higher learning. They are told that they are choosing the place that will be their whole world for at least four years, so they should figure out if it “feels” right, if it attracts the type of peers they can imagine as lifelong friends, if it has the social and extracurricular activities that will keep them entertained, and if they can build connections that will get them jobs when college is over. Continuing-generation students hear stories about joining that perfect club or Greek organization that connected them to the people who became their closest friends and who opened doors to that perfect job. From academic literature to popular psychology in teen magazines and movies, young adulthood is presented as the age of finding oneself.³

Racial-ethnic minority youth enter college with these same developmental needs, hold similar expectations of college life, and confront the same overwhelming menu of options. Within this context, extracurricular activities allow students to find their people and place on campus. This is evident in how Aliyah, a Black female student, talks about her involvement in a women’s leadership organization, Women Engaging, Exploring, and Elevating (W3E).

Regardless of race-ethnicity, all students are looking for a sense of belonging—integration, membership, participation, inclusion—on campus.⁴

The plethora of extracurricular activities today did not appear by chance. Their emergence as spaces for self-exploration is closely connected to what is expected of emerging adults. Arthur Chickering and Linda Reisser, two of the pioneers of research on college student development, suggest that during this time, young people are developing along at least seven vectors: developing competence, managing emotions, moving through autonomy toward interdependence, developing mature interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose, and developing integrity.⁵ College administrators have expended considerable effort structuring the extracurricular activities to support positive development on these vectors and ensure that students graduate with diverse skills and leadership abilities.⁶

Administrators also understand that during the transition to college, youth learn to inhabit a range of identities that are tied to the multiple spheres they traverse across campus. The notion that there is one core identity that does not change may still influence popular psychology, but it is based on outdated theories and understandings.⁷ Each extracurricular group and organization offers youth opportunities to define various parts of who they are and meet different psychological needs. This includes finding a sense of belonging in a community, feeling capable and valued, demonstrating leadership, and developing a positive physical self-image, to name just a few.⁸

Racial-ethnic minority youth are no different in their expectations that participation in extracurricular organizations will define their collegiate experiences. At the same time, their decisions are inevitably connected to the experience of being a minority at a historically White college or university.⁹ We again emphasize that there is no one minority experience; class, gender, sexuality, personality, talents, and interests are a few of the factors that differentiate minority students’ choices and experiences. Nevertheless, the interviews with students in our study revealed interconnected themes in the ways that Black and Latinx youth navigate extracurricular spaces as they transition to college and how those spaces shape their understandings and presentations of themselves.

In this chapter, we take a critical look at extracurricular activities in relation to experiences of race-ethnicity at college and examine the role they serve in minority students’ self-exploration. No one questions the existence of organizations like W3E, and most would applaud the benefits that Aliyah experienced from the group, yet many question why race- or ethnic-specific organizations such as the Latino Ethnic Awareness Association and the Afro-American Cultural Alliance exist, and believe that minority students do themselves a disservice when they anchor their college belonging in such organizations. This is, in part, based on the misconception that organizations that appear to be agnostic to race- ethnicity develop the whole person, while racial-ethnic-focused organizations develop only students’ understandings of their racial-ethnic identity, possibly to the detriment of other aspects of themselves.¹⁰ In opposition to this belief, we detail the role of minority-focused extracurricular spaces in how minority students cope with campus microaggressions and actively counteract stereotypes. We also detail how organizations that do not have a racial-ethnic focus can be leveraged as counterspaces by Black and Latinx youth.

Marked and Unmarked Spaces

Critics of racially-ethnically-focused activities and organizations argue that these groups are detrimental to the creation and maintenance of a common student identity and exacerbate racial-ethnic tensions by isolating students into “mutually suspicious and hostile ethnic enclaves.”¹¹ This perspective assumes that this mythical common student identity is free of cultural bias and can be equally accessed by all. However, at historically White colleges and universities, minority students consistently report feeling excluded from this common student identity.¹² Similarly, on diverse campuses, White students struggle to identify with the mythical common student identity.¹³ Silvia Santos and colleagues found that on diverse campuses White students perceive “that their ethnicity, personal needs, values, and interests as White individuals were not being adequately addressed or were simply ignored by the university. Furthermore, these students felt out of synchrony with their ethnic minority peers and with the campus culture.”¹⁴

Returning our focus to historically White colleges and universities, what if minority-focused student organizations—most of which are only two to three decades old—formed in response to White racial-ethnic organizations and hostile campus climates? This brings us to the concept of marked and unmarked spaces.¹⁵ Critics see minority organizations, such as the Asian Pacific Islander Club, as segregated spaces because they are racially-ethnically marked, and miss the fact that the overwhelming majority of Greek organizations are also segregated spaces because these activities are formally presented as racially- ethnically unmarked. However, minority students not only see Greek organizations as racially-ethnically marked spaces, but also experience them as spaces from which they are actively excluded, as shown in chapter 4. Numerous news media have detailed this active exclusion revealed through racist fraternity chants, social media posts, and other internal organizational documents.¹⁶ Beyond exclusion from this one type of organization, Black and Latinx students often experience isolation more generally across the broader campus because of explicit and implicit messages about race-ethnicity in their daily lives as students.¹⁷

Jim Sidanius and colleagues underscored the similarities between explicitly minority-focused organizations and Greek organizations. They found that identifying strongly with one’s racial-ethnic group is an important factor in minority students’ decisions to join minority organizations, and in White students’ decisions to join Greek organizations.¹⁸ For White students, in-group bias, as measured by factors such as opposition to affirmative action, was an additional factor in joining Greek organizations. Sidanius and colleagues conclude that “while there has been a tendency to associate ethnically oriented student organizations with ethnic minorities, our results suggest that some of the most powerful ethnic environments among White students come in the form of sororities and fraternities.”¹⁹

Defenders of minority student organizations argue that because a defining feature of being a minority in any given context is having to find opportunities to interact with others of the same social identity, minority-focused activities play a critical role in creating sites of concentrated interaction with members of one’s group.²⁰ Consequently, minority youth choose minority-focused groups because they provide counterspaces in which these students can develop and express their racial-ethnic identity. This is especially important because counterspaces facilitate these coping responses within a broader campus context where minority students may be marginalized or poorly understood.²¹

Defenders also argue that minority-focused organizations contribute to campus integration by providing counterspaces where minority students can establish a sense of local belonging, from which they can branch out and connect to the broader campus. The empirical evidence is mixed. Some studies find that participating in minority-focused organizations enables minority students to experience greater comfort with their racial-ethnic identity. This comfort can then lead to more exploration of the broader campus social environment. Other studies find that this participation increases minority students’ perception that groups are in competition and increases their feelings of victimization by virtue of race-ethnicity.²²

These mixed findings may be because, as Kathleen Ethier and Kay Deaux conclude, there is considerable variation in students’ actions once a social identity is made salient.²³ During the transition to historically White colleges and universities, minority students with robust precollege cultural identities were more likely to become involved with their racial-ethnic group at college and increase their level of racial-ethnic group identification. In contrast, minority students who did not express a strong precollege association with their race-ethnicity were more likely to perceive threats to their racial-ethnic identity in college, decrease their racial-ethnic group identification, and experience a drop in self-esteem associated with their racial-ethnic identity. This illustrates “the protective nature of group identity in situations in which the group is a numerical minority and is possibly faced with discrimination from the majority group.”²⁴

In this chapter, the experiences of four students show the variation in Black and Latinx students’ need for and benefit from minority-focused extracurricular organizations. Jason, a Black man, and Maria, a Latinx woman, show that racial-ethnic-focused extracurricular activities can be spaces to actively push back on the marginalization they encounter on campus. These spaces also offer opportunities beyond race-ethnicity by allowing these young people to explore the many possible selves they can become. Aliyah, introduced above, shows that a racially-ethnically agnostic student organization can become a counterspace for examining racial-ethnic issues because it is a micro-community of peers who care. Lastly, Lucas, a Latinx man, expressly rejects the need for a racial-ethnic focus and instead builds his identity through activity- and mission-focused extracurricular organizations.

These four students cover a range of precollege backgrounds, college contexts, and first-year experiences. Jason was a captain of his high school football team, though sports did not earn him a scholarship to college. He wanted to go out of state, but tuition was too high, so he stayed in state and enrolled at Suburban StateU. The second of six siblings, he has an older brother who completed two years of college before leaving. Jason knew his experience would be different; he would obtain a degree in business and succeed in his goal of becoming a human resources manager, as well as be the first in his immediate family to obtain a college degree. He was inspired by his grandfather, an army veteran who often talked about not having had the kinds of educational opportunities available to Jason and his siblings. Jason attributed the success of his first year of college to the varied academic, social, and personal supports he found on campus.

Maria was a first-generation college student whose parents instilled the value of schooling from a young age. Her parents worked in manual labor jobs and wanted a different future for her. She also asserted that she “wanted a different lifestyle, like what you see on TV or whatever,” and believed that college and a degree in business were the way to achieve this. Her elementary and high schools were almost entirely Latinx, and she was in an ESL (English as a second language) classroom until fourth grade. The cultural gap between high school and Urban PrivateU-North was a bit of a shock, but she successfully managed the transition, partly because of the Latinx organization that, a few years earlier, had first introduced her to the idea of going to college, as well as similar organizations she found on campus.

Aliyah also went to college for business. Her Ghanaian parents conveyed to her from a young age the importance of college. On top of this, she felt pressure from the success of her two older sisters, who both went to a prestigious private university. Aliyah chose Rural StateU because of its business program, which she believed would help her get a good job and set her on the path to one day becoming a business owner. She described the transition to college as a bit difficult, especially because of issues with her roommate. The rough patches, however, were balanced by a great community she found in her extracurricular activities, which included W3E, a faith group, and a society of women in business.

While Lucas was also a first-generation college student, he had one older brother currently in college and one who had already obtained his degree. His siblings’ descriptions of collegiate life and advice shaped his expectations of college as a place to experience new things and become involved in as much as possible. His brothers filled the gaps in the support that his Mexican parents, who had only a grade school education, could not provide. A self-labeled competitive person, he wanted to do even more and have even more success than his brothers had. He jumped right into being involved in a number of extracurricular activities at Suburban StateU with the goal of meeting a diverse range of people.

In managing the transition to college and the accompanying questions about themselves, all four students described how their extracurricular involvement provided them with peer support and exposure to new challenges and possibilities. Jason and Maria joined minority-focused organizations to cope with racial-ethnic tensions and stereotypes on campus. Jason joined in reaction to feeling marginalized, and Maria joined immediately upon arrival on campus to preempt potential feelings of racial-ethnic isolation. Aliyah joined non-minority organizations and unexpectedly found herself leveraging the peer relationships she built in those organizations to assert her own racial-ethnic identity as distinct from stereotypes or expectations that others placed upon her. Lucas rejected being involved in minority-focused activities and became involved in activities that allowed him to establish a group of friends, associates, and contacts outside the Latinx campus community. These varied coping strategies demonstrate that individual young people find their own personal ways to respond to and counteract the expectations and stereotypes attached to their race-ethnicity.

Minority-Focused Counterspaces Are Maturational Spaces

Minority-focused extracurricular organizations may be understood as developmental counterspaces that provide structured activities and opportunities for minority students to cope with racial-ethnic tension and pressures on campus. When Jason arrived on campus, he found academic support from tutoring initiatives and monetary help from the financial aid office, but also an environment permeated by racial-ethnic stereotypes and tensions. When asked how he would describe the racial-ethnic interactions on campus, he mentioned a particular verbal assault.

The event prompted Jason to think more broadly about racial-ethnic tensions on campus and what it meant to be Black on his campus.

Research has demonstrated the powerful impact of small, frequent, and often overlooked experiences of discrimination in the classroom, in living spaces, and in social spaces across college campuses.²⁵ These racial-ethnic microaggressions include feelings of being invisible in classrooms, facing lowered or negative expectations or double standards, and other implicitly conveyed stereotypes. Many minority students respond to these subtle experiences of discrimination and racism by withdrawing, attempting to minimize their racial-ethnic identity, or disengaging from campus. Others, like Jason, develop active coping responses to combat stereotypes and structural inequities. For example, some Black and Latinx students responded by vocalizing their experiences, confronting aggressors, and bonding with other students with similar racial-ethnic identities.²⁶

Jason demonstrated exactly these coping responses in the “image busting” activities that his minority-focused student organization, Collegiate Black Men, offered.

Collegiate Black Men exists to mitigate any barrier that stands between Black male students and graduation. By including tutoring, mentorship, and social support, the organization helps Jason and others thrive. This organization provides a space to more thoroughly counteract the challenges Black men face.

Collegiate Black Men became Jason’s campus home because it was all- inclusive and pushed his overall growth and development.

Like Jason, students often described their involvement with minority-focused organizations as not solely about developing their racial-ethnic identity, but also their overall growth and development. Actively developing one’s whole self and the diverse aspects of one’s identities is critical for minority students who often have to code-switch—develop and deploy different aspects of themselves to cope with the distinctive situational demands of their social status. Counterspaces can help students develop a core sense of self, which can alleviate the pressures of code-switching. Minority students may draw on these counterspaces and the experiences they offer to assert control over how much they adapt their self-presentation to meet the often stereotypical assumptions of others.

Minority-Focused Counterspaces Are Bridging Spaces

Minority-focused extracurricular organizations also helped bridge the cultural divide associated with transitioning from a minority segregated high school to a historically White college or university. For some youth, the pathway to college is distinctly shaped by the intervention of organizations focused on increasing the numbers of minority students in college. Consequently, their college experiences are framed from the beginning as finding academic success and belonging through the support of minority group members.

Maria fits this profile. She became interested in Urban PrivateU-North when participating in a college-bound, career-focused organization for Hispanic high school students. This early exposure to Urban PrivateU-North made her college choice easy and also put her on a path to college and through college by focusing on becoming a Latinx businesswoman.

Once on campus, she immediately connected with the Latinx groups, knowing that in these spaces she could find the cultural understanding, belonging, and support that would help her succeed in college. As Beverly Tatum argues, it is developmentally supportive for minority youth to seek out racially-ethnically defined spaces to establish and affirm this aspect of their identities.²⁷ This sense of belonging may be particularly important for minority students because a strong sense of belonging within micro-communities can extend to feeling greater loyalty to their institution, which in turn may lead to greater persistence.²⁸

When Racially-Ethnically Agnostic Spaces Become Counterspaces

Not all minority students join minority-focused organizations, and some explicitly decided on spending their extracurricular time with organizations that were racially-ethnically agnostic, choosing instead to focus on career pathways, spiritual and religious interests, athletic pursuits, and so on. These racially-ethnically agnostic organizations and activities, however, became counterspaces when the close peer relationships that develop create meaningful opportunities for minority students to actively combat racial-ethnic expectations, stereotypes, and microaggressions.

Unlike Jason and Maria, Aliyah became involved in extracurricular activities not directly tied to race-ethnicity, but, like Jason, she found a space that still allowed her to push back, vocalize her thoughts, and actively define what her race-ethnicity meant to her. Aliyah built tight relationships and a sense of belonging through her faith-based and women’s leadership organizations, which then gave her the courage to embrace the role of being the “spokesperson for Black people.”²⁹ While no one specific moment raised her awareness of the continuing significance of race-ethnicity on campus, she became increasingly aware of a divide.

Aliyah was challenged by this new experience. She had attended a high school that was 70 percent White, 15 percent Latinx, and 6 percent Black, where she learned to build close relationships with students from different racial-ethnic groups. At college, in contrast, “even though no one knows each other, they’re just forming these [racial-ethnic] cliques already. So it was kind of hard for me who’s used to being friends with people from a bunch of different backgrounds.”

Students like Aliyah who had a diverse peer group in high school are more likely to have a diverse college peer group and experience less dissonance in relation to the “chilly” racial-ethnic climate on historically White campuses.³⁰ It is not that minority students coming from diverse high schools do not experience racial-ethnic alienation on campus, but the intensity of their high school peer interactions offered opportunities to develop skills that make it more likely for them to engage diverse peers in college.

Amid a “nerve-racking” transition to college, Aliyah described taking solace in her faith-based group and the women’s business club. She was drawn to these spaces because they were sympathetic with the social identities that she brought with her to college and with the aspirational identity of herself as a future businesswoman. In talking about these organizations, she often switched back and forth between them in her descriptions, which suggests that she was also integrating these two aspects of who she was on campus.

Because she was only one of few Black students in these organizations, she often felt backed into the position of representing and speaking out on racial-ethnic issues, for example after a police shooting of a young Black man made the national news.

The pressure to represent her race-ethnicity weighed on Aliyah. However, because she had built close relationships with these peers, she felt empowered to respond. Thus, Interfaith Leadership Council served as a counterspace because it provided a supportive micro-community to whom she could vocalize her perspective and what her race-ethnicity means to her. “I for some reason am like a spokesperson for Black people,” she said, “and that became very stressful very quickly because I’m lucky enough to not have to know anyone that’s been personally victimized like that, and you can’t put the weight of that on me. That was kinda stressful, but I also thought it was great because it was a way for me to talk about it while people listened. So I don’t know, it kinda went back and forth.” Because Aliyah experienced Interfaith Leadership Council as an ideational counterspace—a micro-community of peers who cared about her as an individual Black student—it became a counterspace that allowed her to have a voice about broader societal marginalization of Black people. As Andrew Case and Carla Hunter note in their detailing of how counterspaces can promote adaptive responding, “the enhancement of one’s sense of self in the face of oppression can and often is facilitated through the presence of strategic others.”³¹

Lucas’s two older college-educated brothers prepared him with a mind-set oriented toward thinking ahead to connections, job referrals, and personal development that could be gained from extracurricular activities. Prepared by the stories his older brothers told, Lucas arrived with a plan for engaging in campus-wide extracurricular activities: “They said look for more opportunities that were offered and not to just slack around and just goof off… . You’ve got to start looking for bigger opportunities. And luckily for me, I actually got an opportunity [to take on a leadership role] my freshman year… . So that was something that was very influential. I was constantly looking for more and more opportunities.”

Amid the tumult of unexpected challenges tied to independence and responsibility, Lucas found a sense of stability and ways to define and develop who he was becoming through his involvement with extracurricular organizations.

His experiences led him to believe that engaging widely created the sense of connection that is at the core of the collegiate experience.

Students like Lucas may choose extracurricular activities because they provide a space to meet “others not like me.” Similarly, research shows that for Black youth, participating in predominantly White student organizations provides them with the opportunity to build cross-cultural communication skills, learn from others, and create feelings of connection with other populations.³² For Lucas, this strategy worked, and he did not just join but created his campus micro-community.

Lucas explicitly noted participating in activities not related to race-ethnicity, but the underlying purpose can still be understood as seeking a micro-community to actively push against feelings of marginalization and isolation on campus. For Lucas and students like him seeking “others not like me,” extracurricular activities offer opportunities to reject others’ determination of boundaries or definition by race-ethnicity.

Scaffolding the Transition

The college transition brings with it an array of new opportunities and new possibilities for defining who one is in new social contexts. These prospects of defining and redefining oneself come at a critical stage of identity development, a time in the life course when questions of “who am I?” and “what is my role in my various communities?” are in flux. Minority students at historically White colleges and universities are additionally confronted with how to define their selves in relation to stereotypes, while also learning how to balance institutional versus personal identity and group belonging, and ideally integrating the two. Minority students must navigate these identity challenges all the while attending to academic success.

As the four students detailed in this chapter illustrate, minority students have varied preferences and needs for minority-focused extracurricular organizations and adopt different strategies to deal with racial-ethnic marginalization. Yet the end goal is the same. Whether these students are interacting with others “like me” or “not like me,” extracurricular activities may serve as counterspaces in which they can define, develop, and assert their racial-ethnic identity. For some youth, having a cultural home on campus is critical for their sense of belonging, while also offering academic, leadership, and career supports that foster the development of many aspects of themselves.³³ For others, participating in activities with students of different racial-ethnic backgrounds may provide opportunities to demonstrate that they do not conform to expectations and stereotypes, while also building cross-cultural, leadership, and career skills, and developing a sense of belonging within a micro-community.³⁴

The interviews revealed that, at times, being in counterspaces where one’s social identity blends into the crowd enables individuals to focus on other aspects of themselves, while simultaneously contesting and counteracting stereotypes and expectations. It will be particularly important for college administrators to pay attention to a problematic narrative that emerged from the interviews: the perceived need to choose between being a member of social identity-based groups and being a member of the institution.

Lucas appreciated all the different resource centers—the Latino, African American, and Asian American Resources Centers. “There’s different resource centers for everyone,” he said. He found that the Latino Resource Center helped him grow in his racial-ethnic identity and cultural knowledge, but lamented that because there was no programming that brought the centers together, students had to choose. “You’re getting a better sense of [your] community and what your culture is. But then you begin to realize that you’re sort of missing out on other opportunities and other cultures that are out there.”

However, once we recognize that this need to choose is socially constructed, it can be deconstructed. Lucas had an inkling of this.

Counterspaces are not defined primarily by the social status characteristics of the participants, but by the common ideals and goals that form the basis for coming together. The goal of the Asian American Resource Center can be shared by students who are not Asian American. However, in the current polarized environment in America, organizations must clearly state the welcome. A recent flyer for a Latin American Dance Association at another university explicitly noted that one does not have to be Latin American to participate.

The task for university administrators is to foster a campus culture that does not marginalize minority-focused organizations as being solely for the development of one’s racial-ethnic identity. This means that while the counterspaces provided by minority-focused organizations and cultural or racial-ethnic centers are important in and of themselves, they also need to provide students with experiences, opportunities, and supports beyond those directly related to counteracting stereotypes and feelings of isolation. Positive development of all students would also be facilitated by a campus culture that promotes involvement in both minority-focused and minority agnostic interest-based organizations, while promoting opportunities for multiple organizations to work on collaborative university-wide events. Essentially, universities might serve student identity development best by promoting a diversity of spaces and allowing belonging, integration, and development to occur in micro-communities, rather than pushing for universal affiliation with the mythical common student identity that is supposedly free of cultural bias.