(Re)Imagining Belonging: Black Women Want More Than Survival in Predominantly White Institutions Christa J. Porter (bio) Feeling connected to a place or community is a basic human need (Maslow, 1954). Higher education researchers have defined this need as a sense of belonging or a student’s ability to connect to campus through support systems, positive interactions, and mattering (Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Strayhorn, 2012). A student belonging to or within an institution has been associated with achieving educational outcomes and success (e.g., social acceptance, faculty relationships, and engagement in extracurricular activities; Vaccaro & Newman, 2016). These definitions, however, often center the experiences of White students. Tachine et al. (2017) asserted Native American students’ need to create a “home away from home” because of cultural invalidation on campus. Similarly, Dortch and Patel (2017) emphasized Black women students experienced belonging uncertainty and were perpetually reminded they do not matter within predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Despite Black women’s persistence and ability to excel within PWIs (Patton & Croom, 2017; Porter & Byrd, 2021), institutional actions (or lack thereof) have not supported Black women’s mattering. Black women students endure covert sentiments of marginalization and overt actions of violence. From being rendered invisible in classroom spaces and student organizations (Hannon et al., 2016) to being escorted out of classrooms by campus police (Patton & Njoku, 2019), Black women must navigate the very institutional spaces that celebrate their graduation statistics, yet simultaneously perpetuate their erasure. Campus leaders highlight Black women’s experiences to market institutional metrics but fail to structurally create an environment wherein Black women’s experiences are embedded within institutional practices and policies (Patton & Haynes, 2018). The purpose of this article is to trouble whether Black women can truly and fully belong in these institutional spaces and among individuals who preserve historical legacies of their exclusion. My positionality as a Black woman who has navigated PWIs as a student, administrator, and faculty member grounded my approach to this study. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Drawing from Schlossberg (1989), Davis et al. (2020) defined mattering as “being noticed, cared for, needed, appreciated, and not overlooked” (p. 24). Belonging is not the same as mattering in or to a place. Belonging can highlight a singular connection to someone or something, whereas mattering necessitates action and assigns institutional responsibility. Because institutions have failed to act or respond with and on behalf of Black women, Black women have created space for themselves, written themselves into existence, and disrupted systems and people who silenced them (Collins, 1986; Commodore et al., 2018). Despite achieving progress and educational success, Black women continue to experience pervasive institutional control. [End Page 106] Collins (1986) emphasized Black women’s social location within White spaces as an outsider-within status. For example, Black women domestic workers were outside due to their identities as Black women but within White households as caretakers. Outsider-within status articulates how Black women experience exploitation due to their socio-historical positioning. In We Want to Do More Than Survive, Love (2019) explained how Black (dark) people navigate educational systems and institutions that often dispose of and erase their experiences. What I am describing is a life of exhaustion, a life of doubt, a life of state-sanctioned violence, and a life consumed with the objective of surviving. Survival is existing and being educated in an antidark world, which is not living or learning at all. . . . This existence is not truly living nor is it a life of mattering. (p. 39) I coupled Love’s (2019) survival framing with Collins’s (1986) outsider-within status to reimagine what it means to belong for Black women who have survived higher education contexts wherein they have not mattered. Black women’s experiences are hyper-visible (within) when convenient for the institution (e.g., graduation statistics), yet they are likely to be invisible (outside) when colleges and universities create practices and policies that positively enhance or support student experiences (e.g., gender-based initiatives that fail to center race). Black women students must survive institutional environments, constantly negotiating whether, where, and with whom their narratives and experiences are valid, let alone matter (Love, 2019). BELONGING AND BLACK WOMEN AT A SMALL PRIVATE INSTITUTION In a larger, IRB-approved...
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Oct 24, 2024
Emi Kanemoto + 9
Open Access
