Drawing Sustenance at the Source: African American Students’ Participation in the Black Campus Community as an Act of Resistance

Abstract

The Black campus community, often viewed as a marginal location on the college campus, is by no means marginal to the college experiences of African American students at predominantly White colleges. Through the close examination of two representative narratives, we demonstrate the role of the Black campus community in the process of college retention for African American students. Participation in the Black campus community enables African American students to develop and execute resistance practices— oppositional behaviors and critical resistant navigational skills (Solorzano & Villalpando, 1998). The resistance practices of African American students at this college perform two functions: (a) a conservative function, in terms of preserving their cultural integrity and extending the Black campus community’s legacy of struggle as well as (b) a transformative function, in terms of challenging and altering the space of the predominantly White campus.