Beyond the Textbook: A Reckoning for Postsecondary Institutions
In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd sparked protests around the globe and challenged everyday Americans, institutions, and systems of power to name racism explicitly as a root cause of injustice and inequity. Colleges, universities, and corporations alike responded with pledges in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and promises to adopt equitable policies and practices in and across their organizations. Now a year later, tangible progress on those pledges lags while many still grapple with what it means to apply a racial equity lens and an anti-racism framework to their institutions.
In the postsecondary world, many institutions have begun implementing educational equity plans, disaggregating student data by race and ethnicity, recruiting more staff and professors of color, and implementing career pathway strategies that specifically target Black, Latinx, Asian/AAPI, and Native American students. While these are admirable first steps, efforts to achieve equity will always fall short if the institutions do not also identify, interrogate, and disrupt campus norms that seed and perpetuate harmful assimilationist expectations, racist stereotypes, and white supremacist ideologies.
In the context of international education, the gap has an additional wrinkle: International students of color often arrive on U.S. campuses anticipating welcome, only to encounter a strange flavor of racism, in which they are judged, by virtue of their nationality, to be exceptions to tacit racial prejudices. Such was my experience as a young international student.
Research suggests this is likely a common experience among the more than 1 million international students who were, according to the latest IIE Open Doors report, studying in the United States during the 2019/20 academic year. Coming from around the world to advance their education, these students unwittingly entered institutions with legacies of anti-Black racism.
A reckoning is overdue. In service of that reckoning, we must ask:
● What can post-secondary institutions do to cultivate a more inclusive campus experience for their domestic and international student populations?
● How can colleges help international students navigate campus life and prepare for employment in American society as the nation grapples with issues of race and racism?
● Can educational institutions dismantle their own systemic frameworks that perpetuate negative stereotypes and acculturate students with anti-Black messages and assumptions rooted in white supremacist norms?
A view from inside
As an Afro-Caribbean international student who completed post-secondary education in the United States, my experiences with overt racism and discrimination were minimal until I entered the workplace. On campus, however, I encountered a subtler but deeply troubling expression of racism, an expectation of acculturation that revealed and invited anti-Black prejudice. Some of my professors and peers treated me as an “exception to the rule.” Consciously or unconsciously, because of my Bahamian heritage and nationality, they made it seem that the pervasive negative stereotypes often attributed to Black Americans did not or would not apply to me, even though I am a Black person. This false notion of exceptionalism created a context that encouraged me (and presumably others) to internalize a false sense of racial superiority. It exposed their assumptions about my Black American peers, and it seeded the ground for anti-Black and assimilationist sentiments that I didn’t fully comprehend would be very harmful to me and to my peers.
As an undergraduate, I rapidly realized that in order for me to remain accepted as an “exception,” I would have to distance myself from words, activities, and even relationships that could be perceived as stereotypically “Black.” If I distanced myself enough, the system would reward me through increased access to opportunities typically reserved for those who were perceived as speaking “well”, dressing “well”, and representing the institution “well,” a coded way of telling us to assimilate to white, European, or Western ways of being. A graduate student at Indiana University put it this way: “What is the price of living as a racial and ethnic minority within the walls of higher education institutions? Part of the cost is erasure. I use erasure in this post to mean the subtle and blatant ways in which higher education institutions reinforce rigid boundaries between whom and what is and is not acceptable.”
Bryce Loo, associate director of research at World Education Services (WES), explored research on international students’ experiences with race for WENR in 2019. Summarizing research by Sharon Fries-Britt, Chrystal George Mwangi, and Alicia M. Peralta, Loo noted that “many international students of color try to avoid taking on race as part of their identity, at least initially. Many do not often see themselves in the specific context of race in the United States.” My educational experience echoed this.
Loo also cited Nilanjana Bardhan and Bin Zhang, who heard in interviews with international students about their struggles to maintain their pre-U.S. identities while negotiating new identities as racial minorities in America. Similarly, students interviewed by Fries-Britt and colleagues spoke of “their experiences in the classroom with peers and faculty, being pulled over by police on campus, being called the ‘N’ word, and responding to comments about their hairstyles and dress.”
The types of acculturation that international students are often pressured to adopt are, at root, anti-Black. These are harmful to both domestic and international students, requiring Black American students to choose between denying their authentic selves or being perceived as perpetuating harmful narratives about Black people (a phenomenon known as stereotype threat). They also require international students, many of whom identify with their nationality not their skin color, to navigate America’s racialized society and choose a racial classification by which to identify. Professors, staff, and students alike then reinforce these notions by rewarding assimilationist behaviors that position students of color closer to white norms and perceived and accepted “white behaviors” expressed, for example, in speech and dress.
To disrupt the spread of anti-Black narratives on campuses, it is helpful to understand more deeply how assimilation works.
What’s an assimilationist?
National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, defines an assimilationist as “one who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group.”
Kendi posits that assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard against which another racial group must measure themselves, or as the benchmark they should be trying to reach. In the United States, assimilationists typically position white people as the superior standard. Assimilationist policies and programs, Kendi says elsewhere in the book, “are geared toward developing, civilizing, and integrating a racial group,” and “reflect cultural and behavioral hierarchies.”
There are multiple ways that harmful assimilationist ideologies show up on college and university campuses, including :
● Through curricula that center white, European/Western, male scholars and position these scholars as the standard, and disregard the scholarship and literature of Black Americans, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Asians, Hispanics and Latinos, and Native Americans.
● Through the policing of students’ dress, speech and language, gatherings, activities, and cultural practices to favor standards that center white-dominant cultural norms, which actively denies individuals of color and students of non-Western/non-European origins the opportunity to fully express their humanity through their own cultural lenses and practices.
● Through microaggressions that proliferate without consequence, including in advice given to international students on “how to be” or “how to succeed,” and through environmental and social cues that leave students at risk of stereotype threat, which research shows severely impacts educational attainment.
● Through campus communications that omit representation of the diverse population and thereby present a false ideal, one that contradicts the reality of a global student body.
● Through the absence of safe spaces and common ground, small group and public forums, professional and leadership training, and discussion rubrics and ground rules that teach and foster constructive discussion and exploration of diversity, inclusion, and equity topics in campus life.
The consequences of these trends extend beyond the campus, and into the workforce.
“Historically, institutions of higher education exist to educate students for lives of public service, to advance knowledge through research, and to develop leaders for various areas of the public service. Today’s universities, however, are required to prepare graduates with the knowledge, skills, and ethical responsibility to meet the future workforce needs of society and to participate fully in the new global economy,” wrote Roy Y. Chan, assistant professor of education at Lee University in Tennessee. “[This mandate has] shifted higher education worldwide from once a public good to now a private benefit, whereby colleges and universities have begun to operate as a corporate industry with predominant economic goals and market-oriented values, which has reduced higher education to a transactional process rather than maintaining its transformative potential.”
The shift in education’s mission from preparing students for lives of public service and developing their “transformative potential” to meeting the needs, skills, and demands of employers (further entrenching capitalism’s hold on American society), has grave implications for racial equity efforts, and serious personal implications for Black and non-Black people of color.
The reality is that domestic and international students graduate into an American work world where institutional racism exists. The phrase institutional racism refers to “the ways in which institutional policies and practices create different outcomes for different racial groups. The institutional policies may never mention any racial group, but their effect is to create advantages for whites and oppression and disadvantage for people from groups classified as people of color.” Institutional racism also impacts an institution’s culture by centering white-dominant norms. According to Louwanda Evands and Wendy Leo Moore, “People of color within white institutional spaces carry the burden of having to choose between tacitly participating in their own objectification and marginalization within the institution or actively reacting against these racial dynamics at the risk of institutional alienation, and possibly exclusion.” These “silent” norms can even impact hiring decisions, inducing recruiters to hire job candidates that they perceive will accept (or not actively resist) the racial dynamics of white institutional spaces.
Simply put, educational institutions cannot succeed at their mission—nor effectively support international students seeking to enter into and shape an equitable workforce—by operating from “race neutral” or “colorblind” perspectives. Nor can these institutions ignore the challenging need to prepare students for a “real world” in which they must be equipped to lead.
Publicly declaring commitments to diversity and equal opportunity won’t be enough. Denial of the impact of race, racism, anti-Blackness, and assimilationist ideologies that permeate institutional policies and practices will leave educational institutions ill-equipped to fully support students who must navigate racism, classism, and xenophobia after graduation day.
A commitment to embody anti-racist principles, policies, and practices must acknowledge and address the institution’s responsibility to foster inclusion, not just diversity, in campus culture.
What does it mean to apply a racial equity lens and an anti-racism framework within post-secondary institutions? Nunana Nyomi, associate director of higher education services at the Council of International Schools, suggests four actions that institutions should take to adopt an anti-racist approach:
● “Fix the inequities in staff recruitment,
● Engage in pedagogy that empowers students to embrace their identities.
● Use the power of education to transcend economic inequity .
● Affirm that Black Lives Matter.”
This is a beginning, not an exhaustive list of actions that can and should be taken at educational institutions. I would submit that administrations also must ask:
● Where are the opportunities for my institution to disrupt assimilationist ideas, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy ideologies?
● Are there structural or systemic contexts, policies, and practices in this institution that foster or deepen negative stereotypes held by professors, staff, and domestic and international students about American Black people and non-Black people of color (whether springing from false narratives held by their own cultures or influenced by American popular culture and media)?
● What can my institution do to engage staff and students of all races, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds in critically interrogating and disrupting systems of racism and the ideology of white supremacy?
Opportunities may be found in student orientation practices, campus counseling services, staff and professional development, student affairs departments, international student and scholar services offices, and campus communications, to name only a handful.
Within this context, there is enormous opportunity for campus leaders to foster real progress. With access to more than 1 million international students from all over the world, educational institutions are uniquely positioned within the talent development ecosystem to disrupt racism and white supremacy ideologies. They have opportunities to demonstrate the ways in which an institution can be truly diverse (representative of all manner of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender identities), truly inclusive (willing to share power with those who have been historically oppressed and systematically silenced), and truly equitable (ensuring that policies and practices increase access and eliminate differential outcomes by race and ethnicity).
To ensure that their pledges of support for equity are not hollow, colleges and universities must not neglect the international student experience as they seek to disrupt their own institutional racism, anti-Black sentiments, white dominant cultural norms, and assimilationist ideologies. Then and only then, can colleges and universities truly be the transformative institutional change agents they were created to be for global society. Critical examination and interrogation of the policies, practices, and cultural messages permeating international educational institutions are societal and moral necessities. Every institution and educational leader has a role to play in actively disrupting racism and white supremacy. What will you do?
Clair Watson Minson is the founder of Sandra Grace LLC, a change management consulting firm specializing in race, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the nonprofit and workforce development sectors. She is an experienced workforce practitioner with more than a decade in talent and workforce development, career counseling, employer engagement, sector-based partnerships, and technical assistance to providers.