Chapter 16: “I Feel Like Where we are from also Matters”: Supporting Racial and Place-Based Identity Development on Campus

I oversee a multicultural center, and today I have a workshop for students enrolled in a first-year student success course. After engaging students in a brief lecture about the purpose of the multicultural center, we turn our attention to the topic of the day: knowledge of self and others. Students complete the Social Identity Wheel¹, self-identifying who they are in the context of ethnicity, gender identity, race, sexuality, worldview, et cetera. After completing the activity, students are invited to reflect with peers about identity saliency and their own identities they would like to learn more about. I have facilitated this activity numerous times, too many to remember at this point; however, something different occurred during the reflection on this day. One student, a Black woman from an urban environment, stated, “I feel like where we are from also matters. I often think about being from the city while on campus, especially in this rural environment.” It was a powerful statement, one leading to enriching and transformational dialogue among students, particularly rural Students of Color, as their storytelling provided counternarratives² to what many in the class previously thought about rural people. For some, rurality is constructed to be synonymous with white. Rural Students of Color began sharing their experiences navigating isolation, poverty, and racism in their rural high schools and communities. They also expressed difficulty finding their place on campus as they did not feel a sense of belonging among their rural peers, who were overwhelmingly white, nor among their Peers of Color, who were largely from the city.