Antiblackness in the Hispanic-serving community college (HSCC) context: Black male collegiate experiences through the lens of settler colonial logics

ABSTRACT

This qualitative longitudinal study explored the experiences of Black males attending a public, two-year, community college Hispanic-serving community college (HSCC) in Southern California. Drawing on the perspective of HSCCs as reflecting a colonial relationship between whites and Students of Color, we outline specific forms of anti-Black racism that include the rejection of Black intellectualism, presumed ownership of Blacks’ intellectual and material property, and psychological violence and rejection of Black suffering. We articulate a need for researchers to attend to institutionalized forms of anti-Blackness across structurally diverse institutional contexts – as well as predominantly white ones – and a need to articulate realities that exist outside the ‘settler colonial logics’ that permeate higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Antiblackness
• Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges (HSCCs)
• colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges’ (HSCC) is used to refer to HSIs that are two-year community colleges. This phrasing is not only a matter of convenience or brevity but an explicit attempt to center the community college in the HSI literature. In using it, we borrow from Zamani-Gallaher who stated on February 26th, 2019 to author three, ‘It is time to reframe and rename. The terminology coined for Minority Serving Institutions has not readily reflected the community college context. My intentionality in applying the acronym [Minority Serving Community Colleges] (MSCCs) is to challenge the four-year centric default and subsequent overlooking of minority-serving community colleges. Nearly half of all undergraduates attend community colleges and the majority of Hispanic serving institutions are community colleges, [and] my calling them HSCCs acknowledges [that] the nuances of MSI contexts and contexts matter’ (personal communication 2019).