Chapter 6: Complicating Belief: Intersectionality and Black College Students’ Spirituality

As evidenced in this book, racial identity alone is insufficient to understand the experiences of Black collegians. Referencing her own identity negotiations, writer and activist Audre Lorde (1984/2007) has written, “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self” (p. 120). In similar fashion, until recently, racial identity has been presented as “the meaningful whole” to describe, define, and comprehend the Black experience in the United States. This reality and its inadequacy particularly regarding sex and gender has been documented by Black women for well over a century (Guy-Sheftall, 1995) and is clearly enunciated in the Combahee River Collective’s A Black Feminist Statement (1977, included in Guy-Sheftall, 1995). Awareness of the need to complicate Black racial identity and the experiences of Black people within such social institutions as higher education has continued to be elucidated with increasing insight and power. Gender, sexuality, social class, and ethnicity are additional frames that have been understood to differentiate Black students’ experiences in college (Choy, 1999; Cuyjet & Associates, 2006; Hall, 1995; Harper, Wardell, & McGuire, 2011; Howard- Hamilton, 2004; Ossana, Helms, & Leonard, 1992; Patton, 2011).