An Afropessimist Examination of Black Undergraduates’ Experiences in the Afterlife of School Segregation

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Wednesday 1:45pm
  In Poster Session: Black Post-Secondary Student Experience, Data, and Belonging Across Educational Spaces

Abstract

Decades after Brown V. Board of Education (1954), Black undergraduates remain at the margins of campus life at historically white institutions (HWIs). While higher education research has consistently documented defacto segregation on HWI campuses, few studies have interrogated the role of antiblackness – the paradigmatic position of blackness as subhuman – in maintaining racial division between black students and everyone else. This intrinsic case study centers the lived experiences of 8 Black undergraduates to examine issues of segregation at a midwestern HWI with an emphasis on Black/white student relations. I employ the Afterlife of School Segregation – an afropessimist perspective that challenges linear narratives of racial progress in education to argue that logics of antiblackness reproduce segregated campus dynamics in modernity.

Author

• Alex J. Kenney, Rutgers University