Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate: The experiences of African American college students

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 2000 by Solorzano, Daniel, Ceja, Miguel, Yosso, Tara

RACIAL CLIMATE AND THE UNDERGRADUATE ExPERIENCE In this study, campus racial climate is broadly defined as the overall racial environment of the college campus. Understanding and analyzing the collegiate racial climate is an important part of examining college access, persistence, graduation, and transfer to and through graduate and professional school for African American students. As reported by Carroll (1998); Guinier, Fine, and Balin (1997); Hurtado (1992); and Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Pedersen, and Allen (1999), when a collegiate racial climate is positive, it includes at least four elements: (a) the inclusion of students, faculty, and administrators of color; (b) a curriculum that reflects the historical and contemporary experiences of people of color; (c) programs to support the recruitment, retention and graduation of students of color; and (d) a college/university mission that reinforces the institution's commitment to pluralism.2 In its negative form, these researchers conclude, these elements are less likely to exist on college campuses. Our research approach provides a critical framework that can be used to study how race and racism, in their micro-level forms, affect the structures, processes, and discourses of the collegiate environment. Utilizing the experiences of African American students as guides, our analysis of collegiate racial climate also takes into account the intersection of racism with other forms of discrimination such as sexism and classism. We assert that a positive collegiate racial climate can facilitate and lead to important, positive academic outcomes for African American students. In contrast, a negative or nonsupportive campus climate is associated with poor academic performance and high dropout rates among African American students (Allen, Epps, & Haniff, 1991; Carroll, 1998; Hurtado et al., 1998).

From this conceptual foundation, our study extends Pierce's construct of racial microaggressions to examine collegiate racial climate and answer the following research questions: (1) How do African American college students experience racial microaggressions?

(2) What impact do these racial microaggressions have on African American students? (3) How do African American students respond to racial microaggressions?

(4) How do racial microaggressions affect the collegiate racial climate?

CRITICAL RACE THEORY, RACIAL MICROAGGRESSIONS, AND CAMPUS RACIAL CLIMATE To address racial microaggressions and campus racial climate, we utilized critical race theory (CRT), which draws from and extends a broad literature base in law, sociology, history, ethnic studies, and women's studies. Though initially utilized in legal studies, CRT has been extended to areas such as education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solorzano, 1997,1998; Tate, 1997), women's studies (Wing, 1996), and sociology (Aguirre, 2000). For our purposes, we introduce some of the tenets of CRT to our discussion of campus racial climate, as it represents a paradigm shift in the extant discourse about race and racism in education. CRT offers insights, perspectives, methods, and pedagogies that guide our efforts to identify, analyze, and transform the structural and cultural aspects of education that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom (see Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, & Crenshaw, 1993; Tierney, 1993).