Campus Counterspaces

Black and Latinx Students' Search for Community at Historically White Universities

Micere Keels

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501746901
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Frustrated with the flood of news articles and opinion pieces that were skeptical of minority students' "imagined" campus microaggressions, Micere Keels, a professor of comparative human development, set out to provide a detailed account of how racial-ethnic identity structures Black and Latinx students' college transition experiences.

Tracking a cohort of more than five hundred Black and Latinx students since they enrolled at five historically white colleges and universities in the fall of 2013 Campus Counterspaces finds that these students were not asking to be protected from new ideas. Instead, they relished exposure to new ideas, wanted to be intellectually challenged, and wanted to grow. However, Keels argues, they were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that enable radical growth. They wanted counterspaces where they could go beyond basic conversations about whether racism and discrimination still exist. They wanted time in counterspaces with likeminded others where they could simultaneously validate and challenge stereotypical representations of their marginalized identities and develop new counter narratives of those identities.

In this critique of how universities have responded to the challenges these students face, Keels offers a way forward that goes beyond making diversity statements to taking diversity actions.

1

Outlining the Problem

It is important to quantify the racialization of college access and success at the outset because, as Tanya Golash-Boza notes, “race scholars have to start with empirical questions about why things are the way they are and push forward theoretical understandings that help us to explicate and end racial oppression.”¹ The goal is to highlight what have become long-standing normative expectations about the racialized aspects of degree attainment that continue to be perceived from the vantage point of individual rather than institutional failings.

Obtaining a college degree is now the principal route to upward mobility in the United States, and because there continue to be large racial-ethnic disparities in degree attainment, inequality continues to grow.² The benefits are clear and undeniable. In 2016, the median income among full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree was approximately $60,112. It was only $35,984 for high school graduates with no college degree employed full-time.³ Also clear and undeniable is that access to the benefits associated with obtaining a college degree is racialized: 15 percent of Latinx, 23 percent of Black, and 36 percent of White adults have a college degree.⁴

It is not that Latinx and Black youth have not internalized the message that they should go to college—they have. From 1996 to 2012, college enrollment increased by 240 percent among Latinx youth and 72 percent among Black youth, compared to only 12 percent among White youth.⁵ Efforts aimed at expanding access to postsecondary institutions have succeeded in creating college enrollments that are more diverse than ever before. However, most historically underrepresented students continue to leave without a degree. Specifically, about 60 percent of Black and 47 percent of Latinx college students will not obtain their degree, compared to 37 percent of White college students.⁶ This low likelihood of degree attainment means that enrolling in college can be damaging for the futures of too many Black and Latinx youth.

Enrolling but not finishing can be damaging because the expansion in college access has occurred alongside increasing costs and decreasing sources of grant aid. Today, the average student receives less financial support than four decades ago.⁷ In 1975, the average Pell Grant covered approximately 84 percent of published tuition and fees, but by 2017 it covered only 37 percent for four-year public institutions and 11 percent for four-year private, nonprofit institutions.⁸ Essentially, tuition increases have outpaced grant aid, and “aid” increasingly comes in the form of loans. In 1980, approximately 66 percent of all federal financial aid was in the form of grants, and 33 percent was in the form of loans. By 2003 the fractions had flipped, and only 23 percent was in the form of grants, and 68 percent was in the form of loans.

This shift toward loan debt is detrimental to the likelihood that students will persist to graduation. Higher rates of grant aid are associated with increased likelihood of graduation, whereas higher rates of loan aid are associated with the opposite.⁹ Racial-ethnic differences in borrowing are striking. Approximately 43 percent of Black and 30 percent of Latinx students, but only 25 percent of White students have more than $30,500 in student debt after four to six years in college.¹⁰

Expanding access while increasing costs without also attending to increasing the likelihood that students will graduate means that not only is college financially riskier but that increasing numbers of low-income and low-wealth students, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx, are exposed to that risk.¹¹ James Rosenbaum and colleagues were among the first to call attention to the fact that given the reliance of low-income students on loans, broadening college access could further disadvantage those students if attention were not paid to increasing their graduation rates.¹² This warning has not been heeded. Enrollment has increased faster among low-income students than among high-income students, but graduation rates have increased faster among high-income than among low-income students.¹³

Consequently, the downside of the successful push toward “college for all” is that access to a degree becomes access to student debt without also providing the supports necessary to increase the likelihood that historically underrepresented students graduate.¹⁴ Because Black students take on the most debt, they have been hurt the most by a system that has prioritized broadening enrollment over increasing persistence.¹⁵ If we are to continue promoting college as the way to enter or stay in the middle class, we must do a better job of creating differentiated institutional structures that facilitate persistence.

Framework for Identity-Conscious Supports

This book orients colleges and universities toward the broad category of identity-conscious supports and, within this category, campus counterspaces as one identity-affirming support that can facilitate the college success of students from historically marginalized groups. Counterspaces are those “exclusionary” spaces where those of a similar social identity gather to validate and critique their experiences with the larger institution. Identity-conscious supports consider how social group memberships differentiate students’ pre- college and college-going experiences, and then provide supports accordingly. There is increasing evidence that identity-conscious supports can help bridge historically marginalized students’ transition to and success at historically White colleges and universities.¹⁶ Advocates of identity-conscious supports take seriously the research showing that social group membership gaps remain even after accounting for academic preparation and intellectual abilities, and then actively work to identify social identity factors that could differentially privilege subgroups of students.¹⁷

One example of identity-conscious supports is the importance for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) departments to intentionally highlight scientific discoveries made by minorities as a way of increasing minority student persistence.¹⁸ Intentionality is needed to counterbalance the implicit messages sent by what minority students call the “wall of White men”—hallways lined with photographs and paintings celebrating the university’s great thinkers. Not seeing one’s group represented in the institution’s cultural artifacts and faculty communicates information about the institution’s social hierarchy. This implicit hierarchy intrudes on marginalized students’ ability to align their social identities with their academic identity—how they perceive themselves as students at that institution—by continually reminding them of their outsider status.¹⁹

Throughout this book, identity-affirming counterspaces are discussed in ways that highlight how they help counteract this outsider status—how facilitating formal and informal “exclusionary” spaces enables universities to create the conditions that facilitate historically marginalized students’ inclusion and integration into the broader campus community. Students who experience stereotyping, discrimination, and alienation appear to feel a greater sense of institutional connectedness when they participate in campus counterspaces.²⁰ When administrators actively facilitate counterspaces, these spaces become institutionalized mechanisms that enable marginalized students to support each other in establishing a sense of campus belonging and academic self-confidence.

Inequality at the Starting Gate

The findings reported in this book come from the ongoing Minority College Cohort Study (MCCS), a longitudinal investigation of a cohort of Black and Latinx freshmen who enrolled in college in fall 2013. The MCCS is a sample of 533 academically prepared students: they had an average high school GPA of 3.5, 77 percent had taken at least one advanced placement course, and their average ACT score was in the seventy-fifth percentile of national ACT ranking. This is also a sample of educationally motivated students: 88 percent were certain they would complete their bachelor’s degree, and 63 percent were certain they would go on to complete a graduate or professional degree. Because this sample of students is academically prepared and educationally motivated, I can shift the focus to factors other than academic abilities in examining their transition and adjustment. Even with this shift, however, there is no escaping the substantial racial-ethnic differences in the K–12 educational resources to which students were exposed, resources such as curricular offerings, academic rigor, discursive teaching styles, and instructional technology.²¹ These differences guarantee racial-ethnic gaps in the extent to which students are prepared for both the content of the college curriculum and the instructional style of most faculty.

Once students get to college, these K–12 inequalities are magnified by institutionalized inequalities on campus. As noted by Vijay Pendakur, a director of college diversity programs, “higher education is currently structured in a way that produces significantly lower outcomes for students of color, low-income college students, and first-generation students.”²² One of those structural inequalities is the extent to which students have college-educated family members who can provide supports that increase their likelihood of succeeding in college. These supports include cultural support (advice on norms and expectations of the social and academic culture of the institution), informational support (advice on how to seek out formal and informal resources and opportunities), and instrumental support (advice on study strategies and acquiring content knowledge for specific courses).²³ This means that Black and Latinx students are more dependent on their institutions for “insider knowledge” about how to navigate college successfully.

However, under the current identity-neutral framework used by most postsecondary institutions, generalized issues such as selecting courses, engaging in cocurricular activities, and adjusting to dorm life are delivered with universal programming. Such identity-neutral programming keeps hidden much of the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge of institutions, knowledge that propagates socio-structural inequalities among students precisely because colleges operate according to many unwritten codes of middle- and upper-class cultural norms.²⁴ Consider, for example, an identity-neutral first-year orientation. The orientation would likely not include discussions about the institution’s norms regarding independence versus interdependence. Students in American universities are expected to be individually motivated, to learn independently, and to develop strong independent voices and ideas.²⁵ Students who do not subscribe to this cultural norm are often unknowingly in cultural conflict with what is expected of them.

As Nicole Stephens and colleagues illustrate, these cultural conflicts are often connected to students’ social class backgrounds.²⁶ They show that first- generation students had a high likelihood of being in cultural conflict with the implicit expectations of historically White colleges and universities. First-generation students were less likely to endorse independent motives for attending college, such as exploring their potential and expanding their knowledge of the world, and more likely to endorse interdependent motives, such as helping their family and being a role model for their community. This cultural mismatch was associated with lower grades, even after accounting for SAT scores. They then showed how a manipulation of university orientation materials to represent the university culture as interdependent (about learning and working together with others) eliminated a performance gap between first- and continuing-generation students.

The Inescapable Nature of American Racialization

One can almost matter-of-factly state that class identity matters in the college transition in relation to the argument that one must make for the continued attention to students’ racial-ethnic identities. The arguments foregrounded in this book are in direct opposition to arguments that students should bring only their academic selves to college, leaving behind attachments to their social identities.²⁷ Suspicions of attachments to racial-ethnic and other marginalized identities are based on the White American belief that the ideal identity is a humanist identity that is free of group allegiances.²⁸ The argument is that people who prioritize rational reasoning over subjective preferences are able to “maturely” reason about issues without regard for how it would affect the interests and advancement of members of their gender, race-ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or any other social allegiance.²⁹ Arguments for adopting a humanist identity are motivated by the assumption that Whites have shed their European identities and associated tribal allegiances. This, however, belies the fact that European customs and values permeate all aspects of American society, and therefore makes the humanist identity a colonized identity in which the price of inclusion is erasure through assimilation.

As Linda Alcoff argues, the push for minority individuals to adopt a humanist identity free of attachment to social groups occurs only when identity is mistakenly essentialized and conceptualized as singular—that there is only one way to be a member of a given social group, and that it is stable across historical time and across social contexts. A more informed understanding of social identities is that they are simply points from which to see; “How could there be reason without sight, without a starting place, without some background from which critical questions are intelligible?” she asks.³⁰

In this sense, one’s racial-ethnic identity is not an immature attachment that individuals must attempt to leave behind, but instead an inescapable perspective from which one makes sense of the social world. This inescapability is evident in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the effects of the Trump presidential campaign’s vilification of Latinx and other minority groups. In August 2015, the second year after the students in my study enrolled in college, they were asked about their personal experiences with Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump’s messages. Their responses revealed that med...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: It Doesn’t Have to Be Race-Ethnicity to Be about Race-Ethnicity
• 1. Outlining the Problem
• 2. The Impossibility of a Color-Blind Identity: Shifting Social Identities from the Margin to the Center of Our Understanding of How Historically Marginalized Students Experience Campus Life
• 3. An Ambivalent Embrace: How Financially Distressed Students Make Sense of the Cost of College —With Resney Gugwor
• 4. Strategic Disengagement: Preserving One’s Academic Identity by Disengaging from Campus Life —With Ja’Dell Davis
• 5. Power in the Midst of Powerlessness: Scholar-Activist Identity amid Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violence—With Elan Hope
• 6. Importance of a Critical Mass: Experiencing One’s Differences as Valued Diversity Rather Than a Marginalized Threat—With Carly Offidani-Bertrand
• 7. Finding One’s People and One’s Self on Campus: The Role of Extracurricular Organizations —With Gabriel Velez
• 8. Split between School, Home, Work, and More: Commuting as a Status and a Way of Being —With Hilary Tackie and Elan Hope
• 9. Out of Thin Air: When One’s Academic Identity Is Not Simply an Extension of One’s Family Identity —With Emily Lyons
• 10. A Guiding Hand: Advising That Connects with Students’ Culturally Situated Motivational Orientations toward College—With Tasneem Mandviwala
• 11. (Dis)integration: Facilitating Integration by Carefully Attending to Difference
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index