The Self-Contained Scholar: Racialized Burdens of Acting Nice in Higher Education

• In Event: 34.047 - Mapping the Contours of Niceness in Education

Abstract

This paper explores how Students of Color at predominantly White colleges and universities are forced to perform Niceness, the resulting harms, and potential for strategic uses of Niceness. Using counterstorytelling, a narrative tool of Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado, 1989), we combine fiction and lived experiences to examine racial power from the perspective of marginalized peoples. We frame the narrative using CRT and Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) (Brayboy, 2005) to highlight how Niceness entrenches structural and ideological relations of power like racism and colonization.

To create our counterstory and analysis, we began with a review of literature on Niceness and Whiteness, campus climate, and counterstorytelling. We then developed questions from the literature and conducted a story sharing circle among the authors and others we knew, focusing on our undergraduate experiences. We then created a composite-character, Lily, to reflect shared experiences as students of color at predominantly White institutions and to illustrate the effects of Niceness on the educational, personal, and social relationships of students of color. The counterstory follows three distinct events over Lily’s undergraduate experience, as a freshman in a general studies course, as a sophomore navigating campus, and finally as a senior preparing for graduation. Each story places Lily in an encounter with the troubles and consequences of Niceness for students of color: speaking in a classroom and being labeled as too outspoken and therefore hostile to white students; confrontations with overt racism on campus and the role of community and friendships on campus; and the importance of mentoring and asserting a scholarly agenda as an undergraduate student. The stories describe the physical, emotional, and psychological tolls that the experience may take on students of color, from the student perspective.

Lily’s story illustrates how “it feels to be a problem,” as Niceness silences and suffocates. Niceness has few consequences for those who perpetrate it— Lily’s White professors and peers—but for students of color, Niceness can cause an introversion, with deleterious physical, social, and physical effects summarized by racial battle fatigue. Lily’s story emphasizes the importance for faculty of all fields to educate themselves on experiences of students of color and how faculty affect student experiences. Furthermore, for institutions of higher education that are entrenched in the history of oppression (e.g. assimilation of American Indian students), TribalCrit and CRT remind us that these conditions may have changed shape, but not disappeared—the underlying racism and colonization remain strong. We conclude by asking instructors and administrators to continuously educate themselves on how to respectfully intervene in these situations in ways that are helpful to SOC and understand that student responses to racism that are not nice, like outrage or frustration, are reasonable, normal, and even admirable qualities that are essential foundations to antiracism.

Authors

• Colin Ben, Arizona State University

• Jeremiah Chin, Arizona State University