Addressing Anti-Blackness in Multicultural Student Services

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: The Different Faces and Facets of Student Support (Table 33)

Abstract

Contemporary conversations about the role of higher education in advancing equity often overlook the specific work of multicultural student services (MSS). MSS departments are an important and delicate site of critique, given their evolving role on campuses across the U.S. In this scholarly paper, we engage Dumas’ (2016) theory of antiblackness alongside Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations as a lens to understand how MSS departments a) articulate how they serve students and their campuses through their mission statements and b) how their mission statements are actualized through their programmatic offerings. We provide examples of ways MSS departments are complicit in perpetuating antiblackness under the guise of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Authors

• Laila McCloud, Grand Valley State University

• Darin M. L. Stewart, University of Denver