In this article, Uma Jayakumar, Rican Vue, and Walter Allen present their study of Young Black Scholars (YBS), a community-initiated college preparatory program in Los Angeles. Through in-depth interviews and surveys with twenty-five middle- and higher-income Black college students, they document the positive role of community in facilitating college access. The authors show that students’ perceptions of YBS's support of their college aspirations are qualitatively different than perceptions of their schools’ support. The authors theorize that YBS participants embrace college-going as an act of resistance to deficit-based narratives regarding the racial achievement gap and social reproduction. By drawing on students’ experiences, they put forth a new model of a liberatory college-going process for students of color that leverages community cultural wealth and promotes transformative resistance.
Recent student protests highlight the institutional neglect of students of color and helped to shape a national discourse on racism in higher education. This study uses critical discourse analysis to examine discourses of campus racial climate that surround a student-led speak-out at a university in the Pacific Northwest. Based on analyses of 38 public texts, the findings illustrate how discourses of campus racial climate move along a continuum of racist, nonracist, and antiracist discourse. It further discusses this movement along three dimensions involving the degree to which the voices of students of color are centered, the way racism is understood, and the emphasis on institutional agency and responsibility. We argue that antiracist discourse, which employs a progressive racism-conscious ideology, is necessary for guiding institutional action.
Immediately after President Obama’s successful campaign, many hypothesized that the United States had entered a post-racial era. This study uses critical race theory to examine how high-achieving Black and Latinx college students make meaning of and navigate affirmative action policy discourses in an era of colorblind racial politics. Semi-structured interviews with 46 alumni of two race-conscious college access programs illustrate how participants employ a race-conscious framework that affirms the reality of race-conscious policies. Their discourse addressing race, intersectionality, and equity disrupts colorblind ideology. Connecting our analysis to the current social landscape, we argue intersectionality offers a framework for engaging politics of accountability. In the conclusion, we conceptually distinguish between post-racial era conditions and post-race (or post-racist) aspirations.
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