JCSCORE

God Bless America: You Got To Take Your Knee Off My Neck

Linda Holloway — 2024-10-14

In the midst of two pandemics during 2020—COVID-19 and social injustice, this poem was inspired by an African-American professor at a historically Black college, specifically during the death of Mr. George Floyd. She wanted to demonstrate not only to her students in a Counseling Diverse Populations class but to the world the historical social unrest in America through the use of poetry. The poem profoundly illustrates the many facets in which America has its knees on the necks of the African-American community causing them to suffocate, being unable to breathe and become productive citizens due to discrimination and racism.

If Not Us, Then Who: Supporting Black Graduate Students

Travis C. Smith — 2024-10-14

Empirical studies about Black graduate students have emphasized their experiences with oppression and marginalization, related psychological impacts, and the survival practices they enable them to persist within Historically White Institutions (HWIs). Yet, some literature falls short of examining how individuals thrive despite racial trauma experienced professionally and personally. Moreover, there is a need for research to explore the role Black faculty play in assisting Black graduate students with addressing racial trauma and engaging in healing practices. Thus, this paper aimed to understand how early-career Black faculty supported Black graduate students in their attempt to do more than thrive while pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in higher education.

"I Started Seeing Myself as a Computing Person": Exploring Latina Women's Computing Identity Development in College

Daisy Ramirez — 2024-10-14

This qualitative study employs interviews to explore the process of computing identity development and maintenance among Latina undergraduate students, beginning from their experiences in introductory computing courses and extending beyond. The findings shed light on the significant influence of factors such as peer and faculty recognition, engagement in identity-based extracurricular organizations, and familial and community relationships on the formation of students’ computing identities and their determination to persist in the field. These insights highlight the multifaceted nature of computing identity development for Latina students and provide valuable knowledge for promoting inclusivity and support in computing education.

The Rodrigo & Luz Chronicles: A Composite Counterstory

Carlos Nicolas Gómez Marchant — 2024-10-14

We provide a composite counter story based on our own experiences grappling with investigating elementary Latinx learners’ experiences and how we have leaned on each other to resist the whiteness of learning to do research in pursuit of a Ph.D. As the counterstory shows, we collectively worked together to write our own continuations of the story between Rodrigo, a graduate research assistant on a project about Latinx learners’ experiences, and Luz, a 4th grade Latina learner who is participating in the study. Together, we supported each other to use storytelling to challenge dominant narratives of the relationship between researcher and researched. Our hope is that this counterstory helps others to reflect on and explore issues of assimilation and provides them permission to challenge how we do research.

Towards an Equitable Future? Whiteness as Futurity in University Responses to Anti-Asian Violence

Brendon M. Soltis — 2024-10-14

In this study, I investigate how the rhetoric used in university responses to anti-Asian violence maintained institutional status quos to protect whiteness in higher education. Using whiteness as futurity as a theoretical framework, I employed document analysis to analyze 54 statements in response to the tragic mass shooting in Atlanta in March of 2021 from university presidents of institutions from the Association of American Universities. The findings illuminate how presential rhetoric deployed a malleable history, urgency in the present, and an imagined equitable future. Further, the statements analyzed in this study implicated the three components of whiteness of futurity: whiteness as aspiration, whiteness as investment, and whiteness as malleable. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Whiteness Protection Program: A Typology of Agentic White Defense

Uma Mazyck Jayakumar — 2024-10-14

White defensiveness in response to racial justice education has increasingly been understood through the “white fragility” framework. This study puts forth a new framework that instead identifies a typology of white defensive moves that actively work to uphold and fortify the white racial contract. Inspired by Solórzano and Delgado-Bernal’s (2001) framework for understanding students of color resistance to racism as active (even when it might look passive, on the surface), our theoretical model illustrates four distinct categories of white racial defense that actively protect whiteness. Because white defensiveness has been primarily examined in the context of Traditionally White Institutions, where white students have been presumed to be “ignorant” or “lacking stamina” for encounters in which whiteness is challenged, we provide examples from an instrumental case analysis (Stake, 1995) of 15 in-depth interviews with white students attending three different Historically Black Universities, where their whiteness has become hypervisible and salient. We identify a typology of four agentic forms of defense: The “Innocent Defense,” The “Liberal Defense,” The “Antiracist Defense,” and The “Persecuted Defense.” We refer to these defenses together as “the whiteness protection program” to connote a collective agreement (part of the racial contract), which calls for rethinking the individualized and passive notion of white fragility. In the end, we argue that understanding these modes of resistance as agentic, rather than fragile results of lack of exposure and knowledge, is essential to disrupting white supremacy and fostering students of color well-being.

Dear Mixed People: Critically Examining Monoracism in College-Related TV Series

Jacob P. Wong-Campbell — 2024-10-14

Multiracial youth are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the United States. What messages might these multiracial young people be receiving about multiraciality in college-related television series? Applying Critical Race Media Literacy and Critical Multiracial Theory (MultiCrit), this study examines representations of multiracial students in Charmed, Dear White People, Ginny & Georgia, Grown-ish, and Black-ish. We find that multiracial college student characters are routinely confronted with “box-checking” on demographic forms and wrestle with the limitations of racial categories to capture complexity and the potential resources/benefits associated with selecting specific boxes. Further, multiracial college student characters question their belonging within monoracial student organizations and interracial relationships. Implications for practice and pedagogy are outlined to better leverage television depictions of multiracial college students toward disrupting rather than reinforcing monoracism in higher education contexts.