The Burdens They Carry: How Black College Students Resist and Internalize Received Messages about Race and Racism
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2018
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Educational Studies
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
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en
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Abstract
At predominantly white institutions, black college students' understandings of their campus
climate are complicated by their experiences of racial microaggressions and racial battle fatigue.
In addition to navigating discriminatory encounters with peers, faculty and staff, black college
students must contend with systemic inequality. Although prevalent research notes that positive
racial socialization practices can prepare young people to think about, address and cope with
racism, few studies have qualitatively explored black college students' perceptions of their
socialization, and particularly, whether or not they were adequately prepared to experience and
conceptualize racism in college. My thesis addresses these gaps by considering how black college
students come into consciousness about racism through racial socialization, how effective they
perceive their socialization history to be, how socialization informs their responses to racism and
how their sociopolitical development manifests through their perceptions of their extracurricular
involvements on campus as activism. Relying on racial socialization theory (Lesane-Brown 2006)
and sociopolitical development theory (Watts 2003; Anyiwo et al. 2017; Freire 2000), my research
questions are: How have black college students' racial socialization histories affected their
sociopolitical development? What is the role of sociopolitical development in governing how black
college students perceive and respond to racism on their predominantly white campuses? This
phenomenological study analyzes in-depth interviews with ten students at Swarthmore College
and Bryn Mawr College to explore the messages students received about race and racism during
childhood and to identify how those messages prepared or did not prepare them to experience
racism in college. The majority of participants describe feeling unprepared; the processes by which
they prepared themselves (through education and activism) are critical to understanding how they
construct meaning of Blackness, resistance, and liberation at their PWIs.