The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3 - 49

Black Students' Responses to Racism

subsequent semester to strategize about best
navigational practices for avoiding racial microaggressions in residential halls, throughout
campus and within the surrounding cities. As
a preventative intervention of sorts, the compiling and sharing of Black student communal
knowledge, through photovoice, allowed for
identifying locational racial microaggressions
on campus represented by individual persons
or specific residential halls. In similar ways
that Delgado Bernal (2001) described passing
generational community memory to "help us
survive in everyday life by providing an understanding of certain situations and explanations about why things happen under certain
conditions" (pp. 624-25), Black students in this
study knew to "spread the Gospel about when
and where not to be on this campus" (Jason) as
a daily ritual. The value of applying photovoice
on PWI campuses as a research practice is
found in being able to visually identify sources
of racial angst, locate institutional agents who
prevent Black students from progressing in
the residential life and promote collective communal empowerment. Additionally, previous
studies by McGowan (2016) about African
American male collegians' experiences with
interpersonal relationships with men at a PWI
and gay Black male experiences at HBCUs concerning navigation of internalized homophobia while learning to locate campus support
(Means & Jaeger, 2013) provide pertinent examples of how to apply photovoice and photoelicitation to assess how campus climates are
interpreted.
These photovoice findings are relevant
because they directly speak to participants'
inability to locate diversity across campus environments, not just within residential halls.

This further contributed to individual and
environmental racial microaggressive experiences. As students who owned their Black
identities, heightened salience was experienced as coupled to perceptions of institutional
campus racial climates as hostile. Basically, the
more Black students experienced racism on
campus the "Blacker" (Cookie) they felt, which
led to their determination to help other Black
students "locate places and spaces just for us"
(Fatimah). This particular realization was followed by direct action, which is connected to
Hurtado, Alvarado and Guillermo-Wann's
(2015) postulation that campus compositional
diversity, historical legacy of inclusion/exclusion and organizational structures like residential domiciles shape students' perceptions and
influence how they are involved and engaged
at PWIs.

CONCLUSION
Black student resilience is a tool used to
attempt to survive, persist, and thrive amid
persistent racial macro- and microaggressive
stressors, whether interracial, intra-racial, internalized, or environmental. Communally informed resilience as, exhibited by participants
in this study, served as a valued form of group
self-care through providing navigational information about how to literally avoid being traumatized. Further, the process of identifying
locational racial microaggressions is not only
beneficial to Black students, but could serve
to inform other students of color about potentially threatening persons and places. As a tool
for residential staff, photovoice informed how
programming can provide not only a map for
avoiding racial aggressive stressors, but also
identify allied locations where Black students
perceive safety, similar to those identified in
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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 3
