Mobilizing Blackness: Analyzing 21st Century Black Student Collective Agency in the University

Abstract

Black student activism in the 21st century has gained international notoriety with popular movements such as #StudentBlackOut, #FeesMustFall, and #ConcernedStudent1950. Between 2014-2017, Black students manipulated the momentum of a larger social movement (the Movement for Black Lives) in order to secure organizing victories for racial justice, both on and off their college campuses. This essay explores the meaning making processes of Black student activists who participated either in on campus or off campus activism between 2014-2017. Emerging themes from the interviews have demonstrated that Black student activists are both politicized and enter movement organizing because of catalytic events, and they see themselves as resource brokers who funnel university resources, labor, and energy into dispossessed communities. I argue that students use their racialized subjectivities in the neoliberal university space to leverage resources. In addition, Black students are highly aware of their positionality, and they raise critiques of their class-fluid positions as college students and the protections that student identity provides them.