Burned Bridges: How Domestic Politics Impacts Black Students’ Campus Lives

Abstract

Burned Bridges: How Domestic Politics Impacts Black Students’ Campus Lives Kali Morgan (bio), Tonisha B. Lane (bio), and Ebony N. Perez (bio) Recent policies, events, and movements have thrust race relations into the center of US domestic politics, as former President Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his administration’s policies aggressively advanced white supremacist beliefs and attitudes (Miller, 2020). White supremacist propaganda, as well as racially motivated hate crimes, have increased on college campuses in recent years, particularly since the 2016 presidential election (ADL, 2019; Sutton, 2019). Across the country, news outlets have reported a steady rise of anti-Black racism at institutions marked by student protests, the hanging of a noose in the elevator of a residence hall, and even physical assaults against Black students. The perpetrators of such racial violence have received lenient consequences, including sentence reductions or “diversion” training (Hoskin, 2020). Students feel these realities: external and institutional contextual factors such as these impact students’ meaning making as they develop their political identities (Morgan, 2021) and their perception of race relations (Lott & Love, 2019). Black college students navigate this vicious landscape as they pursue their college education and develop political and civic engagement habits that educators intend to last beyond college graduation (Denson et al., 2017). Educators may encourage extra- and cocurricular experiences and cross-racial relationships, as both experiences further students’ post-college political and civic engagement (Denson et al., 2017). Yet, these developmental opportunities are also fraught with racial stress. Specifically, Ogunyemi et al. (2020) found that political activism actually heightened racial stress for African American collegians compared to other students of color, which may have been due to greater exposure to racial microaggressions. Moreover, many students arrive on college campuses from racially homogeneous environments and are ill-prepared to engage in cross-racial discussions (Patton, 2016), therefore, making it more difficult to develop the skills needed to create authentic relationships across racial lines (Park & Chang, 2015). Because these cross-racial relationships are critical to students’ post-college political and civic behaviors, for this research-in-brief, we explored the cross- racial contacts occurring organically in Black [End Page 707] college students’ relationships with white peers during the contentious 2016 election cycle. FRAMEWORK We employed the integrative model of racial-ethnic identity enactment (Cross et al., 2017) to answer our research questions: (a) How did Black college students at one historically white, metropolitan university make meaning of racially and politically driven assaults? (b) How did they negotiate intergroup contacts during the 2016 election and inauguration cycle? This framework recognized the agency of individuals to choose the identity enactment they selected in a given situation, differentiating enactments individuals use within their referent groups (intragroup) and those they use across and outside their referent groups (intergroup; Cross et al., 2017). We focused on two types of intergroup enactments: buffering and bridging. Buffering occurs when individuals perceive a threat in the interaction, such as racial discrimination, and seek to protect themselves physically or psychologically. Bridging is building constructive relationships across racial barriers, even though the target individual is associated with the racial group that has repeatedly demonstrated bias (Cross et al., 2017). METHODS We applied interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in this study. IPA enables researchers “to explore in detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world, and the main currency for an IPA study is the meanings particular experiences, events, states hold for participants” (Smith & Osborn, 2003, p. 53). As such, researchers engage in a “two-stage interpretation process” wherein the participant makes sense of the world, while the researcher makes sense of the participants’ sense-making (Smith & Osborn, 2003, p. 53). Our study took place on a southeastern metropolitan campus during the 2018–2019 academic year. To facilitate data generation, we conducted seven 60- to 90-minute focus group interviews with two to five participants in each group. Participants included 28 self- identified Black students (22 women, 4 men, and 1 genderqueer student). Most were juniors and seniors (n = 21), and more than half were in a social science or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major (n = 16). Recruitment strategies entailed sending emails through listservs tied to the multicultural affairs office and...