‘You make me wanna holler and throw up both my hands!’: campus culture, Black misandric microaggressions, and racial battle fatigue

Abstract

Black males are scarce on White campuses. Still, they experience hypervisibility and are targets of hypersurveillance. This study used focus groups and semi-structured interviews to examine the experiences of 36 Black male students attending seven ‘elite’ historically White Research I institutions. Two themes emerged: (a) anti-Black male stereotyping and marginality and (b) hypersurveillance and control directed at Black men by Whites. Participants reported stereotyping and increased surveillance by police on and off campus. They also reported being defined as ‘out of place’ and ‘fitting the description’ of illegitimate members of the campus community. As a result, students reported psychological stress responses symptomatic of racial battle fatigue (e.g. frustration, shock, anger, disappointment, resentment, anxiety, helplessness, hopelessness, and fear). The study finds the college environment was more hostile toward Black men than other groups, exemplifying Black racial misandry.

Keywords:

• Black/African-American males
• race-related stress
• stereotypes
• Black racial misandry
• college campus climate
• racial microaggressions
• racial battle fatigue

Notes

1. Examples of racial macroaggressions against Blacks are the killings in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923, the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, the senseless murders of Dr. Martin Luther King, Emmett Till, and James Byrd and the subsequent racial division it caused, and the current impunity and support for officer-involved killings of Sandra Bland, and of children Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Tamir Rice (see Juzwiak & Chan, 2014).

2. Community policing, for our purposes, is enacted by any citizen who is racially primed (see Smith, 2004, 2010; Smith, Allen, et al., 2007) to believe in anti-Black stereotypes and to suspect Black males of anti-social behaviors without justification. In short, Black males are guilty until proven innocent, or as one of our interviewees describes it, they are guilty of being ‘Black while in America.’

3. The University of Illinois was added as part of the research protocol during the data collection stages. For additional information on this research protocol, see Smith, Allen, et al. (2007).