STUDY: Black Students at White Colleges Fear Loss of Their Cultural Identity
According to a recent study, Black students at predominantly white universities fear the loss of their cultural identities.
Participants confessed to feeling burdened by pressure to assimilate into the dominant culture.
They also expressed frustration with the lack of culture understanding displayed by classmates, and the tendency for them to be singled out because of their race.
“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.”
Simmons’ findings are no surprise given what four decades of research has shown about diversity on college campuses across the U.S.
“In 1968, something like 60 percent of black students attended an HBCU, but now that number is down to 20 percent,” said Georgetown University professor Peter Hinrichs in explaining a report he authored earlier this year on how college campuses are not keeping pace with the country’s growing diversity trend.
Read more at the Huffington Post
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