COLLEGE WOMEN OF COLOR: INTERSECTIONALITY, RESILIENCE, RESISTANCE, AND EMERGING ADULTHOOD

ABSTRACT

In this special issue, we focus on the resilience processes found among diverse groups of CWOC. We emphasize four key concepts: developmental perspective (emerging adulthood), resilience, resistance, and intersectionality. Included are the studies with African American and Latinx young adult women, Latina mothers, and Chinese sojourner women. Papers in the special issue appear as follows: Rana et al.’s paper on Latinx mothers attending college, then Causey et al. on African American women navigating white college spaces with typologies of success, followed by Johnson et al.’s paper, amplifying African American and Latinx women’s intersectional strivings using maternal messages as rudders, and finally, Qin et al.’s paper on international Chinese women managing their immigrant experiences as sojourners in the U.S. In each study CWOC demonstrate successful resistance and striving as the press the boundaries of gender-race constraints.

Keywords:

• African American
• Latinx
• Asian
• college women
• emerging adulthood
• intersectionality
• resilience
• resistance
• racial socialization
• women of color

Acknowledgements

We thank our co-authors for their work on these important contributions, some of whom were student authors helping us decipher their own experiences. We want to especially acknowledge our deep gratitude to the Journal Editor of RHD, Michael Cunningham, who was encouraging, supportive, firm, and recognized the importance of our work. We acknowledge the sources of support on our campuses and from a range of research related sources for the studies presented here, as well as key support from Deja Young in final drafts. We want to extend our heartiest thanks to all the reviewers who contributed time at inopportune moments with incredibly fast turnarounds to ensure quality in the offerings. Finally, and most importantly, we acknowledge the innumerable hours of time given by the women this special issue represents, to share their stories, their truths and circumstances, so as to be seen, so that we might learn and act.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).