Racialization and Spaces of Exclusion in International Higher Education

• In Event: Coloniality, Racialization, and Othering in Higher Education: A Study of Myanmar, Iran, China, and the United States

Abstract

Since the 2016 presidential election, resurgent racism and nationalism in the US have been increasingly targeting students of color in academic, residential, and social spaces. It is an urgent task for universities to interrogate inclusion and exclusion, because a growing number of foreign students are pursuing education in the US at a time that celebrates diversity but is silent on integration. Previous studies have shown that non-white international students are more likely to experience racism than their white international student counterparts (Constantine et al., 2005, Hanasaab, 2006, Lee & Rice, 2007). Microaggressions and stereotyping are also affecting the college experiences of foreign students of color, who have a higher risk of depression (Li et al., 2019), acculturative stress (Franco et al., 2019), and victimization (Bonistall Postel, 2020).
In this paper, I investigate the ways in which race and racialization shape academic and social spaces as well as educational experiences in an era of globalization of higher education. It is a part of a 12-month ethnography analyzing global flows of bodies, capital, nationalist, and racial ideologies, as well as their implications on education and social relations across borders. In this paper, I specifically draw on data collected on Chinese international students’ racialized experiences, their understanding of race and racism, and the exchanges of racial ideologies.
Findings of this project reveal the persistence of the ideology of whiteness and culture-based exclusion, which not only racialize foreign students of color, but also engage with this student population to perpetuate white supremacy. Chinese students were oftentimes objectified as economic capital and diversity signifiers. They were frequently excluded in academic, social, and residential spaces. However, participants in this study interpreted their isolated college experiences as a natural result of living in a white university town, the mentality of which reflects the perpetuation of the whiteness ideology as well as China’s state ideology of racial and ethnic unity. Both whiteness ideology and China’s state discourse on unity aim to consolidate differences to elevate the interests of the dominant groups.
While marginalized, Chinese students also voluntarily isolated themselves from local Black and Asian American communities in the university town. When these students did mingle with Black communities, such as during hip-hop events, their artistic preference of Black cultures does not necessarily translate into the appreciation of Blackness. Rather, it echoes colorblindness in new ways that separate Black characteristics in the cultural form from their roots in the lives of Black communities. To these Chinese students, Americanness is also defined by the lack of Asianness, which echoes the troubling history of the racialization of Asians as the perpetual foreigners in the US. As a result, these Chinese students are simultaneously validating a global racial hierarchy. Through individual experiences of students, this paper calls out the systemic racism in higher education institutions as well as the role of nation-states (such as students’ homelands) in forming international students’ racial understanding in the host society.

Author

• Shanshan Jiang-Brittan, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author