Black people, especially Black women, have used dress to reject racism and discrimination and as a means for negotiating their Black and activist identities. Building on past work, we examine how Black women use dress as an embodied practice to negotiate both their Black and activist identities. We focus on a particular space and time: campus life at predominantly White institutions during the Black Lives Matter movement era from 2013 to 2019.To achieve this purpose, we conducted 15 in-depth, semistructured wardrobe interviews with current Black women college students. Overall, we identified three themes relating to Black women college students: experiences on predominantly White campuses, negotiating Black identity through dress, and negotiating activist identity through dress. Examining how Black women negotiate identity through dress recognizes their stories as important through counter-storytelling, allowing Black women to write their own history in their own voices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.