This article foregrounds the experiences of graduate(d) student athletes, defined as college athletes who earn a bachelor’s degree before exhausting their athletic eligibility and take postbaccalaureate or graduate coursework. Findings from semistructured phone interviews with 11 graduate(d) student athletes in Division I football suggest participants are able to marshal their academic credentials to negotiate stereotypes. Examining how simultaneously being a graduate(d) student and a football player impacted participants’ vulnerability to stereotyping, I find that despite the ability to disrupt stereotypes, obstacles both systemic and individual may inhibit this effect. In particular, I explore the themes: stereotyping, disrupting/disproving stereotyping, trailblazer/role model, and invisibility. I also attend to the factors contributing to this subpopulation of college athletes’ continued invisibility and offer implications and suggestions for practice.

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.

The use of affirmative action admissions practices in U.S. colleges and universities has been a source of contentious public debate and legal battles since the policy's inception in the 1960s. The legal challenges to race-conscious admissions will continue for the foreseeable future, including renewed court scrutiny on specific universities' policies (Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin et al., 2013). Although the benefits that arise from a diverse student body are well-documented, it is less clear how that process occurs within the classroom. Using rich qualitative data from a national sample of 203 law students, this study examines classroom-level diversity, consequences when it is absent, and necessary conditions for activating the educational benefits. From the students' perspective, structural diversity in the classroom is a necessary prerequisite for more enlightening, interesting discussions, which promote better learning outcomes. However, the mere presence of diversity does not necessarily educe these benefits, the diversity must in fact be "activated" (Marin, 2000). Therefore, we find faculty members have the responsibility to create spaces for diverse viewpoints to be heard and to facilitate discussion so all students benefit. We call for training to help faculty take on these roles, along with other implications for policy and practice, concluding that U.S. law schools must do a better job incorporating racial diversity in teaching, learning, and practice, or they will have failed to address a compelling national interest.

As the most watched college sport broadcast of all time, the US Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN)’s College GameDay (CGD) is one source of socialization that primes US audiences to make certain associations. Through disaggregated analysis of regular- and post-season CGD pre-game and game-of-the-week broadcasts during the 2016 football season, the authors examine the coverage of players’ physicality and injuries, contrasting the portrayals of Black and white American football players. The paper documents prominent narratives that promoted Black players as relatively invulnerable, while making the case that these narratives serve to prime audiences to ascribe inhuman abilities to Black people and thereby reinforce white supremacist ideology.

After reading Columbus Dispatch's cover story "Battle of Brothers" about the upcoming collegiate football game in which my two youngest cousins-who are brothers-would face each other, I was annoyed. The article used the term "fifth year senior" to describe the elder brother, which struck me because it was juxtaposed with a description of his younger brother as a "thirdyear junior"-not only making a fifth year seem aberrant, but also transforming a purely athletic achievement (playing as a freshman) into a disingenuous testament to his academic progress. Yet, as a collegiate athlete under the purview of the NCAA, the elder brother was a "fifth-year senior" in his final year of eligibility despite having walked at graduation the year before, completing an internship, and starting coursework toward a graduate degree.