This article explores how particular understandings of Blackness among African immigrant students and parents shape their experiences of exclusion and belonging within the American educational landscape. Based on ethnographic interviews drawn from a larger mixed-methods study of African immigrant students and parents in a mid-Atlantic community, the article discusses the meanings these immigrants give to race, and the ways in which being an African Black was associated with experiences of exclusion in US society. Interviews also revealed a significant resistance to identification as African American ‘Black’, as African American Blackness was associated with styles of self-presentation and behaviour that do not conform to immigrant ideologies surrounding a good education. Lastly, African immigrants express a powerful belief in American opportunity that fuels aspirations for economic success. This analysis suggests avenues for exploring how Blackness, immigrant status and transnational identifications matter for theorizing intersections of race and belonging in diasporic populations.
Liberal arts education is highly commodified, yet it also boasts to cultivate critical thinkers and progressive changemakers. What exactly is the kind of “critical mindedness” that liberal arts institutions produce? Drawing from Bourdieuan concepts and recent anthropological work on elite subject formation, I explain how undergraduate students in an elite, predominantly White institution refashion the notion of “critique” as part of their elite habitus. I argue that neoliberal educational institutions enable the new elites to speak about (and advocate for) structural change without ever having to scrutinize their own elite subject position. This depoliticized notion of “doing critique” promises little progressive social transformation and reinforces the hegemonic power of neoliberalism from the inside out. I conclude by highlighting the situatedness of “critique” and its pedagogical potential and limitations.
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