When they see us: racial criminalization, racial stigma, and identity in a Midwest college town

Abstract

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level injustices are reflected in micro-level processes. This project uses critical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of 'criminalized subjectivity' among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white institution of higher education in the Midwest. This study utilizes semi-structured interviews to not just gauge the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction but also how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. This was rooted in a continual process of awakenings, reflection, and interactions with participants gaining more complex appreciation of their racial identities as they grew older. Students also were increasingly aware of racial stigma and criminalization as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of who they were as people. Sensitivity to membership in a criminally stigmatized racial group was also shaped by perception and anticipation of navigating spaces. University life also became a site of these processes; college-aged peer groups served as important sites of collective identity-building and students juxtaposed space and region in ways that reinforced subjective sensitivity to being in a racially stigmatized group. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.