Chapter 1: Introduction

It took me a year to agree to write this book, one of the longest “waiting periods” for me in terms of thinking through the decision to pursue another writing venture. Of course there were good reasons to tread carefully through the thicket of decisions associated with writing a book of this kind too. First, I had just moved institutions from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where I spent the first 5 years of my academic career, to The Ohio State University (OSU) as a professor of higher education, and I wanted to invest time and energy to activities that were consistent with the values and expectations of my new academic department and college at OSU—what’s affectionately called “Buckeye Nation,” referring to the massive size of the institution’s student enrollment and alumni base. Indeed, we are all too familiar with stories about faculty who exhaust themselves on books only to learn they “don’t count” in university promotion decisions. So, I wanted to be sure that the time and energy that I would devote to this book would not only count in terms of advancing the scholarship on Black collegians and our collective understanding of inter- sectionality, but would command credit when it comes to future evaluations of my work. Indeed it would, so I was inclined to accept the challenge.