This Is Our Villages’ Degree: Reflections and Advice From Black First-Generation Doctoral Students

ABSTRACT

While less than 6% of Black or African Americans earned doctoral degrees in 2021, Black first-generation students are graduating from doctoral programs nationwide. Although facing a series of challenges, we are creating space in the academy where little exists. Amplifying the voices of three Black first-generation scholars, this article highlights the capital and support systems we used to navigate our journey to doctoral degrees in higher education. Using song titles, we provide reflections and advice for other first-generation scholars navigating doctoral education. Although our positionalities are varied across our minoritized identities and life experiences, we contend that our collective narratives can help Black, first-generation doctoral students across any discipline, along with researchers and professionals who wish to further understand the assets and supports needed for Black, first-generation students broadly, and Black first-generation doctoral students specifically.

KEYWORDS:

• Black first-generation students
• community cultural wealth
• doctoral students

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For the sake of this article, we identify Black first-generation doctoral students as those of Black/African descent who are the first in their immediate family to receive a bachelor’s degree and go on to enroll and complete doctoral programs.

2. In this article, the authors use a lowercase “w” when describing white or whiteness and capitalize Black when referencing Black people. The authors use lowercase for terms such as anti-blackness or anti-black. We lean on Dumas (2016), who shares, “white is not capitalized in my work because it is nothing but a social construct, and does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization and terror … I write blackness and antiblackness in lower-case, because they refer not to Black people per se, but to a social construction of racial meaning, much as whiteness does (p. 13). By de-emphasizing the word white and capitalizing Black helped us to honor and humanize Black people.