Study: Black students at white colleges fear losing cultural identity

According to a recent study published in the National Communication Association’s journal Communication Education black students fear they’ll lose their cultural identity while attending predominately white institutions (PWI).

TheGrio Staff

Jul 24, 2013

From Clutch Magazine:

“[Black students] feel tension between integrating into the dominant culture while honoring their own culture and black pride,” study author Jake Simmons, assistant professor of communication studies at Angelo State University concluded.

“As a group, African-American students wanted to assimilate into their respective universities, but at the same time they expressed a need to maintain cultural independence by segregating from them,” the authors wrote. “The need to segregate was born out of a fear that the African-American culture would become less independent and more similar to the dominant culture.”

The sample size used in the study was quite small with only 67 students. The students surveyed were from Midwest and Southwest schools where black students made up only 4.5 to 8 percent of the population.

As a person that attended a PWI, I can definitely relate to the segregation aspect. At Rutgers University, segregation was nearly impossible not to miss. There was the Paul Robeson floor of one dormitory, as well as Livingston College, that was always described as the “black” campus, and the other “black” section, Busch Campus where you were always advised to live if you wanted to be around “your people”. But I also think these factors at Rutgers, made it appealing to more black students.

Read the rest of this story on Clutch Magazine.