How to Help Minority Students Feel That They Belong

By Peter Monaghan

FEBRUARY 23, 2020

Micere Keels

College students from underrepresented ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups do not want “safe spaces” so they can hide away from challenging ideas. On the contrary, many of them relish exposure to stimulating new ideas. But they also need “counterspaces” in which they can recover from harm they experience on their campuses.

So writes Micere Keels, an associate professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago, in Campus Counterspaces: Black and Latinx Students’ Search for Community at Historically White Universities (Cornell University Press).

She and a team of researchers periodically surveyed a cohort of more than 500 black and Latinx students at five historically white institutions and interviewed 70 of them. Minority students continue to face questions about their presence on campuses, she says, from outright racism to small-scale but powerful slights.

A lack of preparation for the way things work on campuses often leaves them vulnerable, students reported. For example, not understanding how residence-hall assignment works, they may find themselves clustered in less-desirable parts of the campus.

Many minority students, including academically well-prepared ones, come to campuses already wounded by long-perpetuated racial-ethnic inequity, Keels says. Many are first-generation students, some of whose parents are ambivalent about their collegegoing. Many of them also struggle financially. When a crisis arrives, they may feel alienated by demeaning responses from administrators.

Minority female students may find themselves marginalized even more than their male counterparts do, Keels reports, because of the dual legacies of racial/ethnic and gender stereotypes. She says in an interview that many campus administrators are blind to such dynamics.

When it comes to increasing “diversity” in enrollments, she asks, “to what extent do administrators think that the bulk of their job has been done once students get onto campus?” She suggests that, consciously, or more often subconsciously, administrators have historically viewed “diversity” as a matter of colleges’ simply assimilating minority students while remaining unchanged.

False inclusivity and what to do about it are among the topics minority students need to work out, she says. For that, she suggests, they need “counterspaces": favored gathering places like cultural or resource centers for minority students, or programs of study that are conducive to positive identity formation. They may have to figure out how best to press their colleges to set up such resources.

In those counterspaces, Keels says, identities that are disparaged or ignored in campus cultures are not just explored and deepened but also critiqued. In that way, students may create for themselves a genuine sense of belonging on campus. Lacking that sense, they may retreat from campuses altogether.

Keels says she uses the word “counterspaces” because the term “safe spaces” has been co-opted by commentators who appear hostile to the presence, let alone success, of minority students.

While many administrators oppose such caustic views, she says, that does not excuse their lack of attention to the realities of racial and ethnic experiences on campuses. Why, she asks, does American higher education continue to fail to use data about students to build better predictive models of which minority students will experience various kinds of strife? “We found that doesn’t happen,” she says.

No wonder, she says, that campuses occasionally erupt over racial and ethnic issues. News coverage of those eruptions often leads hostile observers to deride student demands for “safe spaces.” Such sneers ignore, she says, that minority students have often “been talking to their institutions for years, asking for safe spaces, or ethnic-studies offerings, or increased faculty diversity,” and yet have felt unheard.